>I am trying to do a report that has one parent table and two related child tables.
>Each child table has numeric columns that need to be formatted properly in the report.
>After printing some page header information, I need to list all of the records from child table 1, then with completely different headings, print the records from child table 2.
>This seems like a very common task but I'm not having any luck. I am using SQL 2000 on the back end and pass one cursor file to my report handling routine. Any ideas would be appreciated.

The usual way to handle this is to make a UNION into a single table (put the details vertically one beneath the other). You may need to include fields, in both parts of the UNION, which you only need in one detail band.

Add a field that indicates to which of the detail bands the records corresponds.

In the report, create fields for both "detail bands" in the only available detail band, and use conditional printing. The same for the headers.

Another alternative is to print a variable expression in some cases.

HTH,

Hilmar.