Advanced Report Design - Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - page 199

Figure 6-21
Column Placement and Indentation
One of the typical challenges associated with a table is that horizontal space is limited. There are two
common techniques for dealing with these limitations. The first technique you'll use in this example is
to merge columns together, which will give values more space, even with the column spacing reduced.
This effectively extends the first cell in the range and hides other cell values. You may find it necessary
to abbreviate column headings, so you can resize the columns and get the desired effect.
The column space used in our report by the CategoryName and SubCategoryName group fields would
be unacceptable if I needed this space for other fields. I'm going to resize these columns to make room
for some additional fields. I've added four more fields to my data set query: ProductNumber , Color ,
StandardCost , and ListPrice . To add additional columns to the table, I right-click on a column
header and select an option to insert a new column from the pop-up menu, as shown in Figure 6-22.
I'll repeat this step to create the four columns and then drag and drop the fields from the Dataset
window to the new cells in the detail row. In Figure 6-23, you can see that the CategoryName and
SubCategoryName fields and the table header text for the new columns no longer fit.
To fix the column headers, I'll change the text using abbreviations. Since I have room for the
CategoryName and SubCategoryName field values in adjacent cells, I can merge these cells. Simply drag
across all of the cells, right-click, and select Merge Cells from the pop-up menu, shown in Figure 6-24.