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Hide duplicates and only count those records

I'm helping a user set up a report where he wants to hide the duplicates. That's no problem. The problem is he wants to count the records under each category, but he only wants to count those records that are unique. So in other words, if the Office Name "Taylor Service Center" appeared 3 times under a category, he only wants to display it once and count it once. How do I count only unique records??? We're using Access 97. If I have to use code, please be very specific, as I'm not a programmer. Thanks.

chuck_forbes

Maybe, group the report on the field Office name, and put a RunningSum (see help menu on this) in the footer of that group (you can set it's visible property to NO and set the group footer's Can Shrink property to Yes - so that it doesn't appear in the final report). Then in the Report Footer, put a text box that refers to the text box that contained that running sum with "=Sum(txtRunningSum)". Just guessing though, never tried it.

-Chuck

esu4236

ASKER

The report is already grouped on the Office Name. I have a group footer set up and that's where I'm doing the count function. I cannot do a RunningSum or a Sum function on this field, as it's not a numerical field. It's text. So I think I have to do some sort of counting, but I need to only count unique records.

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PsychoDazey

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Jim Dettman (EE MVE)

You can also do the count right in the report. In the report declarations section, dim a variable to hold the total:

Dim intItemCount as integer

then in the Group Headers OnPrint event do:

intItemCount = 0

then in the detail sections OnFormat event do:

If FormatCount = 1 then
intItemCount = intItemCount + 1
End If

and last, in the Group Footers OnFormat event, place the count in a unbound text control:

Me![txtGroupCount] = intItemCount

'txtGroupCount' is the name of the control that you create.

Jim.

esu4236

ASKER

I ended up adding another column in the underlying query where it is counting the office names. And then in the report, I'm counting the total office names under each agency in a group footer.

JDettman - I wanted to try your suggestion, but I didn't understand it. I didn't understand what you meant about "in the report declarations section, dim a variable". I had no idea where to go for this. Sorry.