>Just wondering on your thoughts regarding a particular report that is very wide. Essentially it's a report laid out like a calendar, but with days of a given running across the page horizontally. Essentially it's like you take a regular calendar, slice up strips representing the weeks, then arrange them end-to-end on one long strip. So... this results in 37 columns (31+6 -- you may have up to 31 days in a month, and you may have to shift the month horizontally up to 6 days so that each column would have the same day of week. For example, look at March 2008 -- if you wanted the first column to represent Sunday, the 1st would be on the 7th column, the 2nd in the 8th column, etc. and the 31st would appear in the 37th column on the page). And of course, there were additional columns -- like names of people that would appear on that line as well. Obviously this required that I tile the output -- and since I couldn't think of any way to other way, I kludged it as a report that was run
>in two halves -- one for the left-hand-side and the other for the right-hand-side (basically you needed to paste together the left and right halves). Worked OK -- except whenever we had names that were so long they wrapped and caused the halves of the report not to line up. The "simple" solution would've been to duplicate this information on each half -- but unfortunately that would probably double the number of sheets to print (with nearly 1/4 or 1/3 of each page duplicated for each band -- something that would otherwise be very hard to explain or justify to the enduser).
>
>Although implementing the report through Excel using automation might work out (as it allows me to tile the printer output), I'd have a tough time trying to justify to the customer for having to buy a copy of Excel for each workstation that this report is being run. BTW, does anybody know if the OpenOffice suite has an automation interface like the MS Office products? (though I'd suspect that the interface would likely be different from the MS Office products -- meaning that I'd probalby have to code for both possiblities...)

1. Do you absolutely, positively need to print it? Could you perhaps put a computer where the report is currently thumbtacked to the wall or bulletin board?

2. Maybe you could experiment with dumping it to Excel, and trying Excel's "fit to page" feature. This would get it all on one page, but with tiny print. Might be OK with a large-format (11x17, or larger) printer.

3. Print landscape mode to a dot matrix printer, or roll-fed inkjet/plotter?

4. I've never used it but I understand OO has an automation interface: http://udk.openoffice.org/common/man/tutorial/office_automation.html

Tamar wrote a book about OO, which includes a chapter on automation: http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/ooo501toc.htm