Match height of controls in report details

[InLaNoche]

I have a customer here that is really picky with the output of her data on a report. The report has about 10 columns. the second last column has conditional formating to set the background color based on its value. The problem I a running into is that the last field in the rows of data can range from 1 line to 5 lines. I know what you are thinking, turn on "CanGRow". Well I do this and I then run into some visual issues. First off, all the controls have a box outline. So what happens is that the last field's box is bigger than the rest in some cases, and therefor already looks bad. I can remove the boxes, and put just an overhead line, but the conditional formating does not stretch with the last control, and leaves a gab below it. also, I lose the divider lines.

in my head, what I would need to do is have the rest of the controls in each row of the details match the height of the last control. Is this possible?

[jonh]

Try Gridlines > crosshatch ?

I seem to get better results if I do - select controls, right click, layout tabular, then apply the crosshatch.

(I don't know much about reports. I've always avoided them like the plague.)

[InLaNoche]

That's seemed to do the trick, though I did not see an option for crosshatch. Instead, I just set it to solid. I've never actually used the layouts, and instead used to do that all manually. I used to hate how it locks things in a specific order... But this worked out great. Also, never saw padding work before but I guess it works with the layouts. The last little bit to this would be to add padding to the top and bottom so that the text is not snug to the top (the end user uses middle align feature in xls that does not seem to exist in access). If I add a top margin (0.05"), then the "CanGrow" does not extend enough to cover the margin change, which seems silly in my mind, and I lose the bottom half of the text.

When I use padding, I get a background band above and below the field that has conditional formating, even in the print preview... If you have a trick for that, that would be great, but for now, thanks for the tip on that!

[jonh]

Glad to be of help :) but, no I have no more tips. Access reports are the reason I learned HTML and how to inject values into a pre formatted rtf. Anything is better than that horror ;)