So I created my help desk using the help desk template in SharePoint. After a lot of tweaking, it is running smoothly and then the request came in. I have a customer that wants to print out the reports. Well, I never really thought much about it in the beginning because I use Excel and just dump everything there and look at what I want. Unfortunately, I have a few old school people who want to come in everyday and just print what they want. Ahhh! After a lot of discussion about why they can not just use Excel, I started researching my options here.
So, first I hit the Microsoft site and started looking up reports. I found something about the Report Viewer WebPart. This sounded like a good plan. I went back to my site, could not find it. Ok, what else can I do here? Next I started reading about Report Builder and SQL Server 2008 R2. This went on and on and from what I could tell we did not have the report server installed. I called the help desk and they confirmed that we did not and that there were not any plans to do this until we went to SP2010.
Now I am back to the old reliable. With SharePoint 2007 one of the nice things is the integration with Microsoft Access and Excel. I probably could have set up some Pivot tables with Excel, but turning on the Macros and Excel in general may scare these customers. Finally I decided to just set up some queries in Access. In my list view I just chose open in Access. Then I made the queries and reports and saved the database. Done, instant reports. Some things you may need to do to make it extra secure: I hid the list and all the queries, I made a switchboard page which just has the report buttons on it, and I went into options and hid just about all the menu options. Since they don't use Acess much they probably will not break it.
One disappointing thing I found in this process is the print action within SharePoint. It basically just prints the webpage. When you go to print a list, it does not repeat the headings on each page. Maybe in 2010?
