Method Community

I am experimenting with the Table Tool in the Report Designer and it looks like a really helpful tool to line up tabular data or grids in reports.  Not to be confused with data tables and screen grids.

I have not been able to find any mention of this in the Webinars and the default reports do not appear to use this feature.

I am thinking it is going to make it a lot easier for me to format columnar reports like line items on estimates, invoices, etc. and it makes it much easier to line up the border lines.

Is this a good idea? or is this feature not supported?  will continue to be supported in future releases?

I know an update for Report Designer is in the works.

Cheers,

James

Hi James,

I don't see anything wrong with using that feature in Report Designer , we don't have any reports right now that take advantage of it but I have used it before and it works quite well.

-Michael

Thanks Michael.  Yes, it does seem to work very well and even appears to support cells within cells, although I try to keep it one row of cells within the frame and avoid cell within cells to make formatting easier.

It can be a bit tricky to get the borders to work as it does not cross bands and any space padding created by bands that create white space between banded sections of the report can create discontinuities of borders and care must be taken to avoid double borders and snapping cells widths to grid increments.  A useful tip is that resizing the entire table can create cell widths in odd increments to the grid increments, but resizing each cell will snap them back to the grid for good alignment of say a data table with a table in a header section.

It's definitely very useful for quickly organizing layout though and the control of text justification within each cell makes the layout look fantastic and the alignment stays perfect as the contents grow.

I have two reports for Estimates that take advantage of this currently.

Cheers,

James