Hi all,

Newbie here. I'm converting an Access DB to Creator. I've learned Forms are tables and Reports are used to edit table rows, not Forms. I've got the data loaded and can maintain it with the Reports already done. I've done filtering and sorting, and some very simplistic scripting to clean up the data after import, switch some field types, etc. I would appreciate some direction on how best to meet a reporting requirement I'm tackling next. 

There are 2 tables involved: Members and MbrCars with a 1:n relationship. (We're a car club.) I want to prepare the printed roster. For each member it shows name(s), address, email(s), phone(s), and cars owned. Each of these are single text fields created by concatenating the row data. Suffixes are used to identify the elements after concatenation; e.g., "phone1 (Cell); phone2 (Spouse); phone3 (Home)" and logic is required to suppress the suffixes for any empty values. I presume the tricky part is combining the cars owned by the member, stored one car per record in MbrCars table, into a  single text field like "yr1 model1 comment1; yr2 model2 comment2; yr3 model3 comment3".

I can think of 2 high level approaches. First, I would somehow create an Excel sheet with one row per member and all cars appended to that row. Then a Word Mail Merge could do the formatting and the conditional concatenation. Second, perhaps Creator has a way to create the formatted report. In Access we have a view to return the one line per member including cars and a Report to format & print it. We use different fonts and left/right tabs to keep the roster compact. With 4 lines per member, the names in large bold, and a blank separator we get 9 members per portrait page.

Can anyone give me hints about viability or technique for either or both of them?

Thanks in advance,

Fred