>I hate the way the report writer does not look at runtime like it does at design. I have a box that I have dragged all the way to the bottom of the page, but it will only display to about 2 inches from the bottom at runtime. There are many group and detail bands, but what's the point of trying to make a report look nice if it never looks that way when it runs? Any advice appreciate. I'm fed up with trying to make these boxes, lines and shading behave.

I still hate it. I've spent a number of hours trying to get vertical lines or boxes to display correctly and it just doesn't work. If you have multiple detail or group bands, getting the veritical stuff to look right is almost impossible. I say almost because I know someone is going to come back and tell me how they got their very complicated report to display perfectly by hacking the FRX and incrementally changing the pixels by a factor of 960 or something. Great. Why can't we just have a native report writer that displays the output like it looks on the damn screen. You're right I'm annoyed; it shouldn't be this difficult. I just gave up and am just displaying horizontal lines to divide my rows. Screw the nice column lines and shaded boxes.