I’m always surprised when someone complains about having to use Word to print a stack of cover sheets and then manually collating the sheets with the reports. You don’t have to work that hard! Access will print a cover sheet for you. Granted, Access doesn’t supply the same formatting tools as Word, but most of the time, that won’t even matter. Unless the cover sheet has some custom requirements, Access should be enough. Next time you need a cover sheet, try Access:

  1. With the report in Design view, double-click the report header’s title bar and click the All tab in the resulting Properties window.
  2. Choose the After Section option from the Force New Page field’s drop-down list.

Now that the cover sheet exists, it’s up to you to drop in the appropriate unbound text and graphic controls. You’ll have to center text and graphics between the top and bottom margins by sight. However, it’s easy to center items between the left and right margins. Simply expand the control to stretch from one margin to the other and then set the Center alignment property. If you change the report’s margin, you will have to resize the controls manually to recenter them.

To add a picture, choose Picture from the Insert menu, locate the picture, and click OK. You can move it, resize it, and even crop it to get just the right balance.