Access 2007 : Printing attachments

Question

The attachments feature in MSAccess 2007 is great. But, it looks like Microsoft left us hanging when it comes to printing a report with the attachments. I only get an icon. Documents I am trying to print are PDF. Is there any way to get the attachment to print on the report? If I attach a jpg, it will be printed. Looks like I need some way to tell Access to print the pdf.

Answer 1

Hi,

I have confirmed that this is a design limitation of the product.  The Attachment control was designed to only display the contents of certain image file formats.  Those formats are: *.bmp, *.emf, *.exif, *.gif, *.ico, *.jpeg, *.png , *.tiff and *.wmf.  If the file format is not one of those image formats, the control will check with the operating system for the icon associated with that extension, and then render that icon within the control.

If you need the ability to print, the workarounds would be to either:

1. use an OLE field - could lead to a large database if you have a lot of (or large) PDF files
2. Adobe PDF Reader setup installs an ActiveX control for the reader. You could embed that control inside an Access report.  The control seems to expose a bunch of methods in its object model, and you could write VBA code to load a PDF file into the control.  It looks like the Load method does load a PDF and display the contents within the control frame.

Given the popularity of PDF files I do think that we (Microsoft) should consider adding *.pdf to the list of supported file types.  I am going to submit this feedback to see if the developers will look at adding this functionality to future versions of the product. 

If you would like to share your feedback/suggestions, you can do so using the following link: 

https://feedback.office.microsoft.com/default.aspx?productkey=office2007

Best Regards,

Kathy

Answer 2

Hi Kathy,

Is there a fix for this in Office 2010?  Also I tried the OLE field, but I keep getting a error that the OLE Server isn't registered.  I checked for solutions, but found nothing that works in Windows 7, do you know of a fix?

Best Wishes,

Patrick

Answer 3

Your related table idea is a good solution.

And the related table idea is nice since it does not require code. You’ll need to create a column to relate this table back to the parent table, and then add a attachment column. So, this child table will have an attachment field but you then only attach one picture to each row in this child table.

Then when you build the report, you drop in the columns you need for your detail section from the main table. You then create a another report and then drop in this sub-report hat is based on that child table. This sub-report wil then repeat and display all the pictures you have attached to the one parent record. The detail section will expand/contract for each record printed.

Albert D. Kallal  (Access MVP)

Edmonton, Alberta Canada

*** Email address is removed for privacy ***

Answer 4

Hello Kathy

I have a similar problem when dealing with attachment fields. I want to add pictures for a DB that register experiments. So I can have more than one picture per experiment and when printing a report I want to have all the stored pictures at once printed, but what I can get from access 2007 its just the first picture replicated as many times as pictures stored into the attachment field.

Is there any way to show the stored pictures in an attachment field all together?

or I need to add just one picture per atachment field and do it like that for each picture I want to add to a certain registry in a related table??

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Mauricio

Answer 5

I'm currently checking into this...

Kathy