Question create a printable receipt?

[miffo666]

Hi

I´m in the middle of my first serious attempt to create a usefull application. My friend is a used car dealer and he really could use an easier way to create reciepts and invoices. Today he´s just reusing the same word document over and over, which is very tedious and time consuming.

I´ve build a vb.net "form" which puts customer info, and so on, in an access database. Each row of the database is one transaction, containing customer info and info about the car, price and so on.

My question is:

Whats the best way to create a printable reciept using the info from the access database?

Should i create an excel template containing all the legal text and then export posts from the database to specific cells or is there a "cleaner" way to do this? Is there some way i could use the "report" function of access perhaps?

Maybe this should be posted in some access forum..

I´ve been searching for answers for days now, any ideas?

Best Regards
Miffo

 

[Tom]

Research VB.net & Crystal Reports.

 

[miffo666]

Thanks, i will.

But it seems to me like there should be some "easy" way to do this.

Hmm...

 

[Tom]

Crystal reports are easy although fairly confusing at first.

It works similar to the VB wizard when you add a data source. With Crystal you add your datasource, tables, fields etc to the file and then just drag & drop the controls on the file itself until it fits your design structure. On the VB end, you just call & show the report and it will display the data for whichever data you want.

As with most things in programming there are numerous ways that your could print, such as coding from scratch and sending directly to the printer but the CR reports should be the easiest way.

While researching keep in mind, Crystal Reports is a seperate software program altogether such as the VB design environment itself. But you do not have to go buy the program itself, it is built into VB.

 

[miffo666]

Ok, great!

Right now i´m trying to export values into excel using automation. It kind of works, but i get these corrupted excel application windows and the excel processes wont die when i close the windows.

I´ll give this a couple of more tries before moving on to Crystal reports.

Almost there...

//Miffo

 

[Tom]

If your Excel report follows a table structure, not totals & summaries etc I have a function posted in some of the threads here for exporting directly from a dataset to an Excel worksheet file without ever automating Excel.

 

[ggunter]

I had the same problem with open Excel files until I discovered this:

Dim oTemp as Object

oTemp = CType(xlsSheet, Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.Worksheet)
TermRcwObject(oTemp)

Do this for each object (worksheet, workbook, etc.) before you close it and it actually closes.