Migrating from Access

alfman05302001

So I am new to PHP and MySQL but have been enjoying learning it. I keep reading how MySQL is so much better the Access, but I was wondering if there was a way to print labels and membership cards, and print other formatted types of reports.

Thanks
Jonathan

Roger_Ramjet

If you are going to use mysql/php on windows then yes, there are plenty of php printer functions to use.

However, there is not graphical report builder in php such as you get with access. If you already have the print jobs set up in access then it would probably be easier to carry on using them. You can connect to mysql from access using odbc so the access report could get it's data that way.

Alternatively, you can just generate html output with php, view it in your browser, and print from there. I use different css style sheets for 'printer-friendly' pages when I want users to be able to print them out nicely: monochrome fonts and grey-scale graphics and such-like.

Sxooter

Note that there are two halves to access. The front end and the backend data store. Access can either use it's own proprietary backend storage, or hit an actual database like MySQL, MSSQL server, PostgreSQL, or Oracle, as long as you've got the ODBC driver for them.

nextgengames

Just a follow up to this, I decided to sit down tonight and play around with getting access to talk to my MYSQL server. Took me about 15 minutes and it happily chatted with my local server. I tried to talk to my live server but it wont have any of it I assume this is due to limitation by the hosting provider.

Is there a workaround to allow external access without adding a new user ?