Let's say you have a folder full of 4000 dpi x 3000 dpi images and a table with records containing the full path to said same.

Now you build a nice little report with a 4" x 3" image control on it in the Detail section, with a couple of columns.

Next bind the report to the table full of paths.
Throw on the controls from the field(s) that have the path.
Then build a Detail_Format event that will set the Image control's .Picture property to the path.

Try to preview your report.
How long before the report no longer displays the images?
20, 30 images, maybe 40 until blank spots start appearing or the image doesn't refresh? (double, triples)
How long before Access hangs trying to display the next page?
How long before Access bombs and dies? (Usually with an 'out of memory' error if not an outright GPF) if you try to print the report unless it succeeds at printing pages full of blank squares where the images should be.

Well if it doesn't display correctly and doesn't print it, it doesn't matter overly but the answer is usually less than 70 depending on the power of the hardware involved and whether you've taken more than one run at getting it to work. But in short, it doesn't work. You won't get WYSIWYG.

Now try 4 columns of 2 x 1.5" controls

Really? Still? In 2018?
With some legerdemain and the WIA library I can get to about 650 images. How come that wasn't fixed long ago?
And how come the images in the preview (jpg) now look like crap but print ok? They looked (and still do look good) in Access 2003. What's with that?

How's about you FIX all the things you broke after Access 2003 -- like context-sensitive F1 VBA offline help, and respect for image transparency?

I have a report which sorts on the sort field alphabetically, but I do not want this. I need to define that the following sort is carried out but I can only sort in an ascending or descending order without adding a lookup to another table or altering my item names containing the following:

In progress
Not started
Ongoing
Waiting for someone else

If I sort alphabetically they end up as

In Progress
Ongoing
Not Started
Waiting for someone else.

Not started is more important to me than ongoing, so I would like it to appear before Ongoing, but the only way I can do this currently is by calling each line:

1 In progress
2 Not Started
3 Ongoing
4 Waiting...

which isn't a very aesthetically pleasing solution.

Please could you enable (or publicise how to) allowing custom sort orders.

Thank you,

Sort out the crashing problem with Printing reports to Microsoft PDF Printer when in a domain environment.

Access opens a report and when you try to automate the printing process to Microsoft PDF Writer it crashes intermittantly. It crashes with an MSACCESS application error event but I believe it to be related to Microsoft Print Spooler.

Printing to hardware printers first seem to be ok, but printing to PDF or XPS first create problems when on a domain. Zero issues with same code on same OS and Office versions when in a workgroup or when the domain computer is unplugged from the network.

Windows 10 Pro x64
Office 365 for Business

Event Error Data...

Faulting application name: MSACCESS.EXE, version: 16.0.11727.20230, time stamp: 0x5d14100a
Faulting module name: MSACCESS.EXE, version: 16.0.11727.20230, time stamp: 0x5d14100a
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x004fc552
Faulting process id: 0xc78
Faulting application start time: 0x01d53719a071c448
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\MSACCESS.EXE
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\MSACCESS.EXE
Report Id: 57a46f77-6ae6-44f6-9af9-51859fa920f8
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

I see this in both Forms and Reports, but it's more irritating in Report Design as the labels are more likely to have visible borders. Sometimes a report gets copied and repurposed to a similar task or the definition of a data set gets updated. When you edit the text in an existing label, the border automatically collapses around the new text, making it look ugly and poorly aligned to the other neatly arranged labels on the Report/Form. I don't care if it clips, I'll resize the font from the ribbon. I don't care if it leaves extra space - it's supposed to, so it looks like the rest of them... I only noticed this recently, maybe I'm just designing more than before, but either way - it's terrible unproductive behavior. I might as well start from scratch, if I can't reuse an existing design, that took hours to make.

I have a need to place a fairly complex chart in an Access report, and I wasn't able to create the chart in Access so I did it with Excel. The data actually resides in SQL Server, and there is a data connection that runs a stored procedure to bring it into Excel. This works find if you manually refresh the data in Excel, get the chart to refresh in Excel (which doesn't seem to work as easily as it should), and save the spreadsheet. If you then run the report the linked chart will work correctly. But when you are working with a database, a more typical scenario would be that you need to repeat the chart with different data for each group header or footer, so you may need to produce hundreds of them, and that has been a nightmare for me. I have been unable to discover a good method of automating the refreshing of both the data and the chart, and getting it from Excel to the Access report. Doesn't seem like this should be so difficult. For that matter, it would seem to make sense for charting to be the same in Access and Excel.