Flexible report

[Bruce]

I have designed a report to print out the information
entered into a form. The records in the report appear one
after the other, with page breaks in the printed report
occurring as needed. Sometimes there are several lines of
information for a record, and sometimes just one. I woud
like the report to use only the amount of vertical space
necessary, and not leave a lot of blank space when there
is just one item. Perhaps I should mention that the form
has ten fields into which information may be entered
(there are ten fields in the corresponding table as well),
and that the report includes all ten fields. Unused
fields are blank, but still take up space.
Ideally the form would be of flexible size, but if that is
possible I fear it would be too complex for a beginner.
Or maybe not? I'm just trying to get pointed in the right
direction here.

 

[Pavel Romashkin]

You can enable "can shrink" in the properties for text boxes on the
report. But this will only work if your text box is all that takes up
the page width, in other words - if its empty, page can shrink and
nothing else holds it.
In order for auto shrink to work, the controls should not touch each other.

Pavel

 

[Mark Reed]

This works for me in this situation Bruce - but there are no doubt other
solutions and I'd be curious to know them.

Try reducing the height to as liitle as possible for each of your fields in
the report - the smaller in height the more room you save.

Keep the spacing between the fields the same.

In the properties for each field set the 'Can Grow' property to True.

When the report runs the field will grow to accomodate any data, but only
take up the reduced space if there's no data.

HTH

Mark.

 

[Bruce]

I thought I posted a reply, but I don't see it here. I
ended up using the Can Shrink property, which worked well
once I figured out that the I needed to set the same
property in the form detail. There will always be at
least one line, and there are labels and other fixed width
elements to keep the form from shrinking horizontally. I
experimented with Can Grow with very short text boxes, but
it was too difficult to handle the controls when
designing. I can see that this would work well in some
instances, but concluded that for my needs the Can Shrink
choice worked best. Thanks to both for your replies. The
answers will be helpful in many other situations as well,
I am sure.