>I am developing an application for a trucking company and am starting to work on a dispatch form. They are currently using Excel to display the information that they use but this has several drawbacks. To me this suggests a grid but the problem is that they need to see so much info about each job (including the 20 trucks assigned) while displaying as many jobs as possible on the form that it needs display more than one row per record. I have started playing with custom controls to locate more than one text box in a container which I can then place in the grid but since I have never seen or heard of anyone doing this I have the feeling that I am going to discover something ugly or am overlooking an obvious alternative. Any thoughts?

One other alternative to placing a ton of controls inside of the grid is to move them out of the grid. In you grid, show the most important information. As they move focus down the grid (selecting different rows), populate text boxes that could sit above/below or to the side of the grid that hold the additional info.

I'm doing the same thing for an app. that needs to display a set of invoices. It gives them a quick look at all the invoices they're working on and they can easily get a lot more just by clicking on the other they're interested. I've got a bunch of text boxes that sit below the grid that I fill with all the other information that they could be interested in. Since everything is on the same page, they don't have to flip between two different pageframes.