David,

A little more detail on what Ed said:

Create an SQL cursor (very non-normalized) of everything you want on your report. Each record would have customer name, address, order number, order date, item details. In other words, lots of repeats on name, each record has a different detial. Order/group by customer, order, item.

The alternative, trying to step through 2 or more tables with a relation, will only give you debugging headaches if the wrong table is selected.

I select a couple of records into my cursor and save as D:\ReportTestData so I don't have to keep re-running the SQL while I work with the formatting.

Also, I do not use the filename prefix in the expression for my report controls. I do a lot of out-of-context reports, and it's easy to run the report form using a subset of the data.

I have places in my reports where I can pass in a footnote or whatever via a memory variable. This might be used on an invoice for "This months special is..." These values are not in my cursor.

If you need to do mass changes to report controls you can USE the frx and REPLACE... (see the April Advisor)

I guess this is about $0.03.

<snip>
>I imagine that many of you have found yourselves at this (multi-)fork in the road and have dropped back to consider which of many ways to walk, that you have settled on as the best, most flexible way to handle report creation. I invite you to share your experience with me. <vbg>
>
>TIA,
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>David