Alternate Background Fill Question

[Courtney]

I've done something that's probably non-standard in my layout. I've got a sub-summary part (leading), and I made it really tiny (.025 inches high) and just put my summary field barely touching it and mostly overlapping to the body, in order to minimize white space on my report.

When I then use the "alternate background fill" property on the body, the fill covers up the summary field in every other row. I've made sure that the summary field is "brought to front" in the layout, but I'm hoping there's a button or checkbox somewhere to fix this little problem.

I can live without the alternate background fill, but it sure does make the printed report a lot easier for users to read.

Thanks for any suggestions.

~Courtney

[Ender]

Can you post screenshots of the report in Preview Mode and in Layout Mode?

[Courtney]

Hopefully this is what you meant... the Zip is a Word file with screenshots of both layout and preview mode, both with the background fill and without, so you can see what's being hidden.

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

~Courtney

Screenshots.zip

[Ender]

The screenshots were helpful for understanding the issue you described. I don't have a solution in mind that would give you the layout exactly as you seem to want it, but here's a couple ideas anyway:

1. In the summary part, just put a darker break line. Put the Company Name in the Body part. This would still conserve vertical space but would show the Company Name on each line.

2. Expand the sub-summary part and put the entire Company Name field in there instead of overlapping the Body, then use a smaller font. This uses more vertical space but can give more horizontal space for additional fields in the Body.

3. Don't use alternating colors. The line on the Body part makes it easy enough to scan across the rows.

[Courtney]

Option 3 is probably what I'll end up going with if I can't make it work otherwise. Just trying to make everything look as familiar as possible for my users. They hate change, and we are going through major growing pains moving from FM4 to FM7 and integrating a bunch of solutions for efficiency.

Thanks for looking!

~Courtney

[comment]

4. Use a sorted relationship and a put a calculated Company Name in the body -

Case ( CompanyID = related::CompanyID ; Company Name )

[BobWeaver]

Stacking order on Layouts:

Even though you change the stacking order of the summary field by bringing it to the front, it only changes the stacking on the part where it resides, but the parts themselves have a predefined stacking order. From back to front they are: Header, Leading Summaries, Body, Trailing Summaries, Footer, i.e., the vertical order in which they appear in the layout. So you can never have a leading sub-summary item in front of a body item.