Over the years, I have seen countless posts regarding images in reports rendering very pixelate images even though the image itself was of decent quality & displayed and printed fine in other applications.
Access seems to always render default bmp, wmf or ico formats, but outside of those things can get dicey at times.
Some have said this issue became more of an issue when Office 2007 came out. I can neither confirm nor deny this claim.
Now there are plenty of suggestions out there, and there were some fixes put out over the years (images not rendering at all, …), but today I thought I’d offer up another potential workaround.
Use the Web Browser control to display the images rather than a Bound/Unbound Object control or Image control. Yep, as simple as that! The web browser control can handle a variety of image formats and in my experience works reliably at rendering images.
Also, because of potential performance & memory issues … it is always advisable to resize images to the size required for their actual use. No point having an 8.5″x11″ image if it is only taking up a 1.5″ spot on the page (and if you’re storing images directly in your database, please DON’T, this is lead to excessive bloating as well). Resize it prior to using it! Obviously, this still has limits in the sense that you can ever expect to take a small image and stretch it to a larger size without loss of quality, but for proper applications, displaying a 1:1 ratios, or reduced sizes, this approach works just fine.
So the next time you need to display images in a form/report take a moment to seriously consider using the web browser control. It may just save you a few headaches.
A great method for logos is to convert them in EMF format. They print perfectly and since they are in a vector format, they can be resized at will. I have been using that in several apps to provide a background image in reports, in order to replace pre-printed letterhead paper.
See my old question & answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5058162/create-an-access-report-background-in-vector-format-from-word-doc#5127889
This just might come in handy. I never had a need to any Web Browser functions yet, but from what I have seen, the Edge Browser has a LONG way to go before it measures up to IE.
John,
I don’t think we’ll see to much forward movement on the new modern web browser control. I believe it is principally what it will be. MS will fix certain issues for sure (spaces in local file names, …), but for the most part I believe it is what they intended it to be.
Also keep in mind that past history has shown us that once delivered features rarely move forward much, think of modern charts for instance!
Thanks Dan, your back and hopefully you will continue throwing constructive criticism to MSA. It’s a shame that MS and Google didn’t created improved MSA like app in their web based 365 and G-office suite. It only signifies that it is very hard/difficult to clone MSA and it’s RAD functionality or MSA is a big threat? VIVA MSA!