One of the most powerful features of the VSReport Designer is the ability to import reports created with Microsoft Access. This feature requires Access to be installed on the computer. Once the report is imported into the designer, Access is no longer required.
To import reports from an Access file, click the Import button or in the File menu, select Import. A dialog box will prompt you for the name of an Access file (MDB). After you select the file, the Designer automatically scans it and converts all the reports into a new report definition file.
The import process works well and handles most elements of the source reports, with a few exceptions listed below. These limitations affect a relatively small number of reports, but you should preview all reports after importing them, to make sure they still work correctly.
Event handler code - Access reports can use VBA, macros and forms to format the report dynamically. VSReport Designer can do the same things, but it only uses VBScript. Because of this, all report code needs to be translated manually.
Form-oriented field types - Access reports may include certain fields that are not handled by the Designer's import procedure. The field types not supported are Chart, CommandButton, ToggleButton, OptionButton, OptionGroup, ComboBox, ListBox, TabCtl, and CustomControl.
Reports that use VBScript reserved words - Because Access does not use VBScript, you may have designed reports that use VBScript reserved as identifiers for report objects or recordset field names. This causes problems when the VBScript engine tries to evaluate the expression, and will prevent the report from rendering correctly. Reserved words you should not use as identifiers include Date, Day, Hour, Length, Minute, Month, Second, Time, TimeValue, Value, Weekday, and Year. For a complete list, please refer to a VBScript reference.
Reports that sort dates by quarter (or weekday, month of the year, etc.) - VSReport Designer uses the ADO recordset Sort property to sort groups. This property sorts recordsets according to field values only, and does not take expressions. (Note that you can group according to an arbitrary expression, but you cannot sort.) An Access report that sorts groups by quarter will sort them by date after it is imported. To fix this, you have two options. Either create a field that contains the value for the expression you want to sort on, or change the SQL statement that creates the recordset and perform the sorting that way.