Report With Two Columns in Detail Section

[brian4uf]

Good Evening, I'm writing to seek help on a report I'm designing at work. This is my first question here, but I have been a lurker for quite a while now. I am designing a report to be used as a cover letter for court answers on garnishment cases. The case numbers, plaintiffs, defendants, and court addresses are all stored in the table that is the report's recordsource. A cover letter should be generated for each unique court address, with multiple cases going to each address.

Here's what I have so far:
Page Header is company logo, date, and "Re:"
Group Header is the court address, and is how the cover letter is grouped.
Detail Section is Plaintiff-V-Defendant CaseNum


Page Footer is the body of the letter (stays the same for every cover letter) and my company info at the very bottom.

Right now, I can get all of the info to show up nicely using a small data set. If there are no more than 10 or so cases, then the "Plaintiff-V-Defendant CaseNum" shows up in one column. What I want it to do is put half of those cases in one column in the detail, and then the rest in a second column, right next to the first. I need this to be dynamic; one cover letter could be for 2 cases, another could be for 30 cases.

I would also like the page footer, with the body of the letter, to begin immediately below the cases in the detail section. The report I have set up now leaves a ton of white space below the cases if there are only a handful. I need a way to dynamically place the page footer.

I would be grateful for any advice.

[ItsMe]

It sounds as though you are trying to mandate your dynamic data be on a single page. Obviously, this is impossible when the number of records are to great. However, you can optimize the available real estate with columns. The first thing you need to do is get very familiar with your grouping and sorting. Columns should be one of the last things you go after.

I would normally go after the Keep Together and Force New Page properties of the detail after I manage Grouping and Sorting. Since you are going after one page, I guess you can ignore those properties.

You can adjust report column properties from within the Page Setup dialog. From the Ribbon, click the Page Setup tab. Inside the ribbon is a Page Setup button. This button opens the dialog. Column properties are under the Column tab in the Page Setup dialog window.