I inherited a process that involves changing two dates in a query, then running an export/crystal report that takes a minimum of 20 minutes (if it doesn't crash and have to be restarted) for one of our three "Friday Reports" - meaning this happens every week.  Coming up on a new fiscal year, I know I will either have to learn Crystal enough to be able to update the report for the new year, or re-write the report completely. 

Because I am also being asked to pull a series of monthly reports, none of which correlate closely enough to an RE canned report, and because I am moderately familiar with MS Access, I chose to try that route.  It's going fairly smoothly (knock on wood).  However, what my bosses want is a button in RE that will let them run either the weekly report or the monthly reports without having to request these reports from me.

Is there a way to get RE to run a little program that dumps certain pieces of info into Access, and then opens one or more Access reports?  They want me to get Crystal Report training, but I would much prefer additional Access training, if there's an easy way to make the two work together.

Any info on whether RE & MDB will work together, or where to go for some really good, solid, yet inexpensive training on either MDB or CR would be very welcome!

You can add a shortcut to any document (including an .mdb Access databse) on the home page of any RE user.  If you create a simple switchboard in access to run only the reports needed by those people you can do that.  The trick is getting that .mdb populated with current up to date info.  I can't speak on that or on using the backend but at the worst you can run an export at the end or beginning of every day to update the tables in that access database.

I now have a new issue for this project.  I got everything setup so that I could export from a RE query and then copy and paste into my Access database (not the best system, but while I'm still figuring things out, it works okay).  However, due to a soft-credit snafu (i.e. my boss wanted to see the soft credit names next to the gifts, which was easy enough, but if there is more than one SC on a gift, the query will essentially double-count it), I now need to export from a RE export.  Which leads me to my question...in a query, you can rename a column, which works nicely when putting into Access.  Can you do the same thing in Export?  I hope so, but I haven't been able to figure out how.

BB has not added this feature yet although it has been requested.  You can go to www.blackbus.org and go to the ideas section and vote for that idea.