Advanced Report Design - Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - page 201

Two of these columns contain currency values that need to be formatted. I'll change the Format property
to standard currency. The custom properties dialog for a text box contains a format selection list. You can
also use this dialog or the properties window to type a format string. In this case, the format string for
standard currency is a capital letter C . The formatting options for a text box are shown in Figure 6-25.
Figure 6-25
Figure 6-26 shows the report in preview after making these changes.
Indent with Padding
If you want values to be indented or staggered, you can work around the restrictions of column place-
ment and widths by using the Padding properties of a text box. Padding may be applied to the left,
right, top, or bottom of a text box and simply provides a margin of space between the border and con-
tained text.
To demonstrate, I will save a copy of the report we have been using in the previous example. In the
new report, I will remove the two leftmost columns and place the CategoryName, SubCategoryName,
and ProductName fields in the same column. For the reason I mentioned above, I cannot remove these
columns without first splitting the merged cells back apart. Figure 6-27 shows the new report in design
and preview. As you can see, with all three group fields in the same column, it looks very confusing.
To correct this, I change the left padding property for each of the data-bound text boxes in the first col-
umn. The group 1 header padding is left at 2 points, the group 2 header is set to 12 points, and the detail
row text box is set to 24 points. For reference, there are 72 points to an inch and about 28 points to a
centimeter.