>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?

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I am currently working on an app like this. Our design is basically a tabbed form. First tab is dispatch entry. (Enter billing, pickup, delvery address and estamated times).
Second tab has 2 grids and a number of text boxes. Grid1 is available vehicles. the grid displays the vehicle id, number of open jobs assigned, and communication mode. Grid2 is job inormation. Job control id, vehicle type needed, ready time and committime). As the user clicks on the job in the grid. We display additional (detail job) information in text boxes.
Third tab is POD information. Pickup arrive depart datetime, delivery depart arrive datetime, consignee name, and detailed vehicle information (id, trailer no, driver name, delivery exception codes and bill of lading numbers).

Just an idea of what we did.