Tips & Tricks August 1999

August 1999 Tips & Tricks

Access: Relationships between Access tables are a bit easier to grasp if you can see a visual representation of those relationships. Fortunately, you can open the Relationships window by choosing Relationships from the Tools menu. Access displays the existing relationships between the tables you add to the window. You can also create and delete relationships here. Although this is useful, you can't just click the Print icon so you have a hard copy for later reference. Fortunately, there are two ways to print a graphical representation of these relationships. If you're using Access 97, you can use the Print Relationships wizard, available free from Microsoft. To download this add-in, visit http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/downloadDetails/prels80.htm.

After installing the wizard, choose Add-Ins from the Tools menu and Print Relationships from the resulting submenu. The wizard creates a report that contains a representation of the existing relationships.

If you're using Access 95 or version 2.0, you can't use the wizard. Instead, open the Relationships window and press Alt-Print Screen. Then open WordPad or another text editor and press Ctrl-V to paste a copy of the Relationships window into your text editor. At that point, all you have to do is print the document.

Access 2000 now makes printing the relationships easier than ever. From the Relationships window, simply choose Print Relationships from the File menu and print the resulting report.