Colin,

I have been using the new report system heavily the last few week preparing for the release release of VFP 9 so I can dump Crystal Reports. (I was primarily using Crystal for its subreports but Crystal's interface to VFP OLE DB is so clunky that it takes around 40 minutes to run one of the reports. I can make those reports work about as well with VFP9's multiple detail bands and I am now running that slow report in 25 seconds in VFP9! VFP rocks!)

I have found that for many fields I have to make them significantly wider than the data actually requires to print. This is especially true of numbers and dates, but also occurs with some character fields. Often I need to add space for several extra digits beyond what is required for a date or for the widest number possible based on the formatting string. The computed character data fields I am talking about have no trailing blanks to screw things up and should print just fine in fields much narrower than I have had to specify.

I read elsewhere that there are some problems with field width calculations in the public beta, so I've just been living with it and making the fields godawful wide until RTM is avaialble. I am hoping this is fixed in the RTM version so I can shrink those fields back to a reasonable size.

...Jim