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Watermark By Richard Rost 
4 years ago
Insert a Watermark in Microsoft Access Reports. In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a watermark as a background image for your Microsoft Access reports. Ruth from Danville, Kentucky (a Platinum Member) asks: Is there a way to watermark Access reports? I'd like to add our logo to our invoice backgrounds, and I'd like to put a "confidential" watermark on sensitive reports so that my employees know not to share them. MembersMembers will learn how to use a little VBA to swap the watermark image out based on the data in the report. For example, put a "PAID" watermark on an invoice that's paid, otherwise show the company logo.
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Keywordsmicrosoft access, access 2016, access 2019, access 365, ms access, ms access tutorial, #msaccess, #microsoftaccess, #help, #howto, #tutorial, #learn, #lesson, #training, #database, watermark, background image, logo, picture, How to Add a Watermark to Your Access Reports, Adding Background Images to a Report, how to add a logo to a report, company logo, creating a watermark, insert watermark in access report, Me.Picture, CurrentProject.Path, image gallery, embedded, linked, shared, openreport
IntroIn this video, I will show you how to add a watermark background image to your Microsoft Access reports. You'll learn how to create a watermark using Microsoft Word, save it as an image file, and then insert it into your report as a background. I also cover the different picture embedding options in Access, how to adjust display settings like Zoom and Clip, and how to make your report controls transparent so the watermark stays visible. This tutorial is a step-by-step guide for adding company logos or confidential stamps to your Access reports.TranscriptWelcome to another TechHelp video brought to you by AccessLearningZone.com. I am your instructor, Richard Rost.In today's video, I'm going to show you how to add a watermark background image to your Microsoft Access reports. Today's question comes from Ruth in Danville, Kentucky, one of my Platinum members. Ruth asks, is there a way to watermark Access reports? I'd like to add our logo to our invoice backgrounds and I'd like to be able to put a confidential watermark on sensitive reports to my employees, so as not to share them. Yes, Ruth, adding a watermark is pretty straightforward. It's just adding a background image to the report and I'll show you how to do it in just a minute. Getting the watermark picture itself is a little tricky because Access doesn't have a way to make a watermark. But if you have Microsoft Word, which most Access users do, I'll show you how to take any old picture, put it in Word, and then make that into a watermark that you can then put into Access. Let me show you how. Before we get started, I recommend you go watch these videos if you haven't already. My images video shows you how to work with images in Access. The Snip and Sketch video will show you how to use the Snip and Sketch tool. I believe now in Windows 11 they call it the Snipping tool. It lets you take anything you see on your screen and save it as a file. That way, we can put something into Word, make it a watermark, save it as a file, and then import it into Access. So, if you don't know how to do that or how to take a screenshot, go watch that video. The other two aren't necessary. The invoicing video - I'm going to use an invoice in my video right now, and in that invoicing video, I'll show you how that was built. So if you care, go watch that. You don't have to. The purge image gallery is handy also because Access lets you put images into the image gallery. And if you don't want them in there, that video shows you how to purge the gallery. So, the second two are not really prerequisites, just kind of recommended. Here we go. I'm starting off with a copy of my database that I just called Watermark, and I've got an ALZ Access Learning Zone logo, which is just my actual logo file. Let's turn this into a watermark for us. If you have other editing software like Photoshop or whatever and you want to come in here and play with the brightness, or make your own watermark, if you know how to work with graphics, go ahead. If not, I'm going to use the easy way out, which is just to drop this thing into Word and use Word's watermark feature. It's super easy. Watch this. Load up Word. New blank document. Go to Design, and then right over here under Page Background, go to Watermark. Then, down toward the bottom, pick Custom Watermark. Pick Picture Watermark, or you can type in Text if you want. I'm going to use a Picture. Select Picture. Pick a file on my local drive. I'm on my desktop, which is right there, ALZ.jpg. Hit Insert and then hit OK. There it is, right down there. See that? Look at that. Nice and pretty. It's in the background. It's washed out, just the perfect amount. Now we're going to use the Windows Snipping tool to take a screenshot of that. Get it on your screen, nice and pretty. Get your cursor out of the way. I actually like to use a program called HyperSnap. I don't use the Snipping tool. I think HyperSnap is a little better. I'm going to make another video about HyperSnap. It's an older shareware utility, but I love it. I bought a copy of it like 10 years ago, and I love it. So I'm going to grab that right there. That's going to be saved on my drive. Now you can close down Word. Don't need it anymore. You can save that if you want to make changes later. I'm not going to bother. Here's my image that I just snapped. Let me open that up and make sure it looks good. Perfect. Beautiful. Looks great. I'm going to rename this to ALZ-Watermark. That's the full image, the watermark image. Let's open up our database now. It's a copy of my TechHelp free template. You can grab a copy of this off my website if you want to. It's a free download. Now, in my customer form, I can go to orders and then click on invoice, and there's my invoice right there. I want to put that watermark right in the background, right behind my invoices. Let's right-click, go to design view. There's my invoice. What we're looking for is the report properties. Make sure you have the property sheet open. If this guy is not open, just double-click right where the little block is. That opens up the property sheet for the report. Make sure you're not down here. That's the section - that's the report header section and that's the detail section. You want to be right there so that little block is highlighted in the report selection. Now, find the Picture property, right there. It says none. You can drop that box down if you have images in your image gallery, which we don't. I don't usually use the image gallery. I personally don't like it. There are a couple of different modes you can use. Embedded, which means the image that you choose will be saved in this report, and only this report will use it. There's linked, which means it's going to keep an eye on the original file, and if that original file changes, it will actually change in your report. Linking is kind of cool. You can do that if you make sure that database has access to that file all the time. That's good if you want to change the image and not have to update the report all the time. Then there's shared. Shared simply means that the image will be saved in the image gallery, which, if you watched that other video, you know what that means. That way, other reports and forms can use the same image. It's up to you, whatever you want to do. If you're planning on using this image in a bunch of different reports, put it in the image gallery. That's fine. Save it as shared. I'm just going to pick embedded, which means this image will be saved in this report. If you watched my images video, I usually recommend against saving images in the database in the tables as data, like customer pictures and product pictures. Save those as external files. If you have a logo or a watermark that you're going to use a couple of times here and there, that's fine. You can save that in the design of your database. We just don't want to save images in the tables for all of our records. I'm going to go to Picture and I'm going to click that button. Then again, go to my desktop, and there's my watermark right there. There's the watermark I just created. It'll put it there, and you can see it right there in the background. Let me open this up. See it? See it right there in the background? Looks good. There are some other options for that. There's Picture Tiling - do you want it to repeat, do you want it to tile over itself so there's multiple copies of it? That doesn't look very watermarkish - that's more like a background kind of thing. There's the Picture Alignment - do you want it centered, top left, top right, bottom right, etc. Size Mode is tricky. I usually pick Clip. In other words, it's going to make it that size and clip off anything that goes over the edge. With Clip, you can set exactly what size you want, and that's based on the exact size of your image. You can make it larger or smaller, whatever you want. You could change it to Zoom. Zoom will make it scale, but keep the aspect ratio (height and width). Stretch will usually make it look weird. It stretches it to the dimensions of the page. And you have Stretch Horizontal, Stretch Vertical. Let's go with Zoom, because if you have a little image, it will zoom it out but still keep the ratio, and if it's too big, it will also shrink it but still keep the ratio. So Zoom - I usually pick Zoom. Unless you want a tiny little watermark in the center of the page, you can pick Clip. Play with those options. Quick advertisement: I cover working with logos and images, and the Stretch, Zoom, and Clip modes in my Access Beginner 6 class. If you want to learn more, I'll put a link to this down below. Advertisement over. Let's save this. Ctrl+S. Save it, close it down, and then open it back up again. There it is. Looks good. One more thing to take into consideration. Notice how this guy is kind of over the top of that, and it's blocking the logo. You have to make sure that all of your objects in here have transparent backgrounds. Transparent. Again, go to design mode. Someone actually asked me about this earlier. I maximize this report and notice there's no double maximize button up here. You have to click on Close Print Preview. Once you do that, it goes back to the form that happens to also be maximized, but now you have a separate set of buttons. I don't particularly like the way this is set up. If you maximize a form, you get a double set of maximize and minimize buttons. But with a report, you don't get that. So you have to know to click Close Print Preview, then minimize. It's weird, I know. I didn't make it. I'm not on the Access team at Microsoft. I just have to tell you what to do. So, come in here. What were we doing? Oh yeah, the watermark thing. Design view. You can close this. We don't need this anymore. What you have to do is make sure all of these controls have transparent backgrounds. See how you can see the grid through those labels? You see the grid dots, but you can't see them through these others. That's because these have a white background and these are transparent. You can do them as a block. You can pick those. The easiest way is to go to Format, then drop down the background and pick Transparent. I'm going to double-click this so it stays open, then Format, like that. Then I'll draw a box around this stuff and pick that. What else have we got? These are good, these are good. All of these down here, set to transparent. Everybody should be transparent now. Save it, close it, open it back up again, and voila! There's my watermark. That's very nice. That's pretty much it. You can put whatever you want back there: text, "confidential" across the page, etc. In Hollywood, they put watermarks on script pages with the person who the script was given to. If it's Hugh Jackman's copy, it will say "Hugh Jackman" across it. That way, if he gives away a script, they know who did it. There you go, there's your watermark. If you've got any questions, post them down below. If you want to learn more, in the extended cut for the members I will show you how to swap that watermark based on some value in the invoice. For example, if it's a new invoice, unpaid, you'll see the Access Learning Zone logo on the background. Once they pay and you're sending them a paid invoice, we'll change the watermark so it says "Paid" right across the background. We'll learn about the Me.Picture property, change it with VBA, and cover the OnLoad report event. We'll see how to refresh the invoice data before you print it, and lots more. All of this is covered in the extended cut for the members. Silver members and up get access to all of my extended cut videos. We're well over 200 now. We're at like 250 or something. There's tons of content, hours and hours to watch. Gold members can actually download these databases, plus you get access to my code vault and a lot of cool stuff. That's all for members. How do you become a member? Click on the Join button below the video. After you click the Join button, you'll see a list of all the membership levels that are available, each with its own special perks. Silver members and up will get access to all my extended cut TechHelp videos, one free beginner class each month, and more. Gold members get access to download all of the sample databases that I build in my TechHelp videos, plus my code vault, where I keep tons of different functions that I use. You'll also get a higher priority if you decide to submit any TechHelp questions to me, and you'll get one free expert class each month after you've finished the beginner series. Platinum members get all the previous perks, plus even higher priority for TechHelp questions, access to all of my full beginner courses for every subject, and one free developer class each month after you've finished the expert classes. These are the full-length courses found on my website, not just for Access. I also teach Word, Excel, Visual Basic, and lots more. You can now become a Diamond sponsor and have your name or company name listed on a sponsors page that will be shown in each video as long as you're a sponsor. You'll get a shout out in the video, a link to your website or product in the text below the video, and on my website. But don't worry, these free TechHelp videos are going to keep coming. As long as you keep watching them, I'll keep making more and they'll always be free. QuizQ1. What is the main method demonstrated in the video for adding a watermark to an Access report?A. Insert the image directly into the Access table B. Use the Picture property in the report's properties to set a background image C. Use VBA to overlay a shape as a watermark D. Import the watermark as a chart object Q2. Which Microsoft Office tool is recommended for creating the watermark image before bringing it into Access? A. Excel B. PowerPoint C. Word D. Outlook Q3. When creating a watermark in Word, which menu do you use to access watermark settings? A. Home B. Insert C. Design D. View Q4. What tool is suggested to take a screenshot of the watermark image in Word for use in Access? A. Paint B. Snipping Tool (or Snip and Sketch) C. Notepad D. Calculator Q5. What should you ensure about your controls on the report to make the watermark visible? A. Controls should have solid colored backgrounds B. Controls should all be sent to the back C. Controls should have transparent backgrounds D. Controls should have border styles set to solid Q6. What is the benefit of using the 'Linked' image mode for the report's Picture property? A. The image becomes embedded and increases file size B. The image updates automatically if the original file changes C. The image is randomly selected from gallery D. The image cannot be changed after linking Q7. Which Picture Size Mode is generally recommended for watermark images to preserve the image aspect ratio? A. Clip B. Stretch C. Stretch Horizontal D. Zoom Q8. What is an advantage of using the 'Shared' mode for images in Access reports? A. Prevents other reports from using the image B. The image is saved directly in the report only C. Other reports and forms can use the same image from the image gallery D. Only tables can reference the image Q9. Why does the instructor recommend against storing large numbers of pictures directly in Access tables? A. It makes it hard to search by image B. It increases database file size and can cause performance issues C. Access does not support images in tables D. Reports cannot display these images Q10. What is a common use for watermarks in reports, as mentioned in the video? A. To add animated graphics B. To track which employee received a document C. To change data values in a form D. To improve report sorting Q11. What should you do if you want the watermark to cover the whole background and not repeat in a tiled fashion? A. Use the Picture Tiling option B. Set Picture Alignment to Bottom Right C. Use the Zoom mode for Picture Size Mode D. Use the Stretch Horizontal mode Q12. If you want different watermarks to appear on an invoice based on its status (e.g., Paid or Unpaid), what feature is used in the extended lesson? A. Me.Picture property and VBA in the OnLoad event B. Conditional formatting on fields C. Using subreports D. Printing different reports for each type Answers: 1-B; 2-C; 3-C; 4-B; 5-C; 6-B; 7-D; 8-C; 9-B; 10-B; 11-C; 12-A DISCLAIMER: Quiz questions are AI generated. If you find any that are wrong, don't make sense, or aren't related to the video topic at hand, then please post a comment and let me know. Thanks. SummaryToday's video from Access Learning Zone covers how you can add a watermark background image to your Microsoft Access reports. The topic comes from a question about watermarking reports, whether to embed a logo on invoices or add a "confidential" mark to sensitive reports shared with employees. There is a fairly straightforward method for adding watermarks, though creating the watermark image itself involves a few steps that I will walk you through.Microsoft Access does not provide a built-in feature to create watermark images. However, with the help of Microsoft Word, you can take any image—such as your company logo—turn it into a watermark, and use that image in Access. To do this, insert the picture into a Word document, use Word's watermark features to style it, then capture that watermark with a screenshot tool. I recommend understanding how to use tools like the Windows Snipping Tool or Snip and Sketch, which allow you to save anything you see on your screen as a file. If these tools are new to you, you might want to check out my videos on working with images and using the Snipping Tool before proceeding. To begin with, take your logo or desired image and, if you have software like Photoshop, you can edit the brightness or styling to your liking. If not, the easiest method is to work directly in Microsoft Word. Open a blank document, navigate to the Design menu, then select Watermark under Page Background. From there, choose Custom Watermark and select Picture Watermark. Pick your image file and insert it. Word automatically washes out the image just enough so it looks like a proper watermark. Once your watermark is set in Word, use your screenshot tool of choice (such as the Windows Snipping Tool or a third-party program like HyperSnap) to capture the watermark as an image file. Save this screenshot on your computer with an appropriate name so you can easily find it later. Next, open your Access database—I'm using a copy of my TechHelp free template in this demonstration. Choose the report where you want to add the watermark, such as an invoice report. Switch to design view and make sure the property sheet for the report is visible. Locate the Picture property for the report. Here, you can browse to your saved watermark image and embed it into the report background. Access allows you to handle images in reports as embedded, linked, or shared. Embedded means the image is stored within that particular report. Linked refers to keeping a reference to the external file, so changes to the file reflect in your report. Shared copies the image into Access's image gallery, making it available for use in multiple reports and forms. If the image will only be used in one report, embedding is sufficient. If you want to use that watermark elsewhere, consider sharing it so it can be reused. Once you embed or link your image in the report's Picture property, it appears in the background of the report. You can adjust how the image displays with properties such as Picture Alignment (center, top, bottom, etc.) and Picture Size Mode (Clip, Zoom, Stretch, etc.). I typically recommend using Zoom for most watermark needs, as it scales the image proportionally to fill the space without distorting it. If you only want a small watermark in a specific area, you might use Clip. A critical step is to make sure all controls—such as labels and text boxes—in your report have transparent backgrounds. This lets the watermark show through the information in your report. To do this, select your controls, go to the Format options, and set the background property to Transparent. With all these settings in place, your watermark should appear nicely behind your report content. You can use any text or image you want as the watermark, such as "confidential," or your recipient's name for tracking, similar to how some companies protect script copies in film production. If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to ask below. Also, in today's Extended Cut for members, I show you how to swap out the watermark dynamically based on data in the report. For example, you can display the company logo for unpaid invoices, but change the watermark to a "Paid" stamp once payment is received. This involves using the Me.Picture property, VBA, the OnLoad event, refreshing data before printing, and more. Silver members and up get access to all of my extended cut videos, along with other perks like monthly classes and the ability to download sample databases and functions from my code vault. Gold and Platinum members get even more benefits and priority. A complete step-by-step video tutorial on everything discussed here is available on my website at the link below. Live long and prosper, my friends. Topic ListCreating a watermark image with Microsoft WordUsing the Word watermark feature for logos Taking a screenshot of the watermark using Windows Snipping Tool Saving and renaming the watermark image file Access report design view and property sheet usage Setting a background image for an Access report Choosing between embedded, linked, and shared images in Access Setting image Picture property and importing into the report Configuring Picture Alignment, Tiling, and Size Mode (Clip, Zoom, Stretch) Ensuring report controls have transparent backgrounds Applying transparency to controls in Access reports Testing and verifying watermark appearance in the report |
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| Keywords: TechHelp Access watermark, background image, logo, picture, How to Add a Watermark to Your Access Reports, Adding Background Images to a Report, how to add a logo to a report, company logo, creating a watermark, insert watermark in access report, Me.Pictu PermaLink Add a Watermark to Microsoft Access Reports |
