I am sure that most readers of this post will have experienced the situation where an Access report is saved as an RTF file and opened later in Word only to find that some of column widths do not come out the same. It appears as though some strings of characters come out wider (or narrower) in Word than they do in the open report.

I've had this happen often but now I'm being called upon to actually do something about it. Any suggestions for making the Report and Word versions look more alike? (And no I, cannot use a fixed-space font.)

You could write some VBA to output directly to a MS Word document. You could also set up a word document with merge fields that come from the database as the data source.

I like Rockn's suggestion but sadly do not have time left on this project to develop that kind of solution on my own. I think will try it on my next project.. If Rockn (or anyone) has sample code that uses this aproach, I'd be grateful if you'd post it here.

All I can say, is if you find a fix, please let me know - I have the same problem for a major client (and a huge report) 4x a year, and it usually involves my spending an incredible number of hours correcting the final word documents. (I always copy and paste a number of .RTF files into one final Word document for the client).

Snapshots aren't really practical for document exchange. If I need to distribute my reports I save them as PDF files. If you're sending to Word because you have to edit the report, ...I don't know. If you're editing anyway, I guess the inconsistency wouldn't matter much, so that must not be the issue. I'd just save as PDF.

chris.

Well, there are plenty of free print-to-PDF utilities, and most businesses employ some sort of PDF generator (usually Adobe). We use PDF Creator here, which is, I think, pretty common. If there's a single source for report generation/distribution, there's no issue with deploying utility packages.

The point being, it's a lot easier to gain the capacity to create PDF files (and more beneficial) than it would be to expend effort troubleshooting a formatting problem with a proprietary document type.

chris.

Thanks for all the input...

Sorry output has to be read into word. Can't be snapshot or pdf.

I was hoping there might be some magic fix but you've given pretty much the answers I expected.

Anne- don't think you need to see the differences because you appear to understand the problem exactly... A random phrase in the middle of the page comes out wider in Word that it was in the report and extends past the next tab stop (defined when the report was written as .rtf) and this throws off everything that follows in that line often wrapping the last column into the first tab field on the next line.

I think the solution I'll adopt will be the simplest. I'll define the fields or columns in the report to be narrower than they need to be so that when certain phrases come out wider than expected in Word, they will still not extend past the next tab stop.

Chris, you can't "just save as .pdf"

That could be tough. We'd really have to see the difference between the two. But, it could be as simple as having you run a macro. See... RTF doesn't hold tables or anything, so you're getting tabs...that kinda sucks. Have you tried Ctrl+A then reducing your font maybe a half point (did you know you can type 11.5 into the font size box?)?