Line Counter In Access Reports

Displaying line counter numbers next to detail report detail lines is useful for purchase order and contract details reports in Microsoft Access. Here's an example of how to implement this feature using Access reports VBA code.

Follow these steps:

Create a global variable as show in the image just below the 'Option Compare Database' line.

Create an 'On Print' event procedure for the Detail section of the report.  In this visual basic procedure increment the line counter variable by one each time.  Then the VBA Code assigns the result to an unbound report field called 'Line_Counter'.

Print preview of the resulting increment line counter report is shown below:

 

Note that you can also do a incremental line counter by using an unbound field with control source =1 in combination with the running sum property set to yes.   We provide this visual basic example because there may be other calculations what you may want to perform within the report and this example gives you the basic skills needed to do the other calcs.  Some examples of other calculations might be calculation of standard deviation, mean, and other statistics.