I have a report where I want all members info to print out. It looks like this:

Name

add

city st zip

phone

I used a phone table for the phone numbers. On the report I have a portal that displays the phone numbers where I put the word phone.

My question is, since everyone has a differnent amount of numbers, is there a way to tell filemaker to only use the amount of lines necessary for that record. Currently, I have to figure out who has the most amount of numbers and make it that big. This makes the report look messy when someone has just one number.

Or is there a better way to do this that I am not thinking of?

Thanks Dave

You can try selecting the portal, phone fields, and anything below them, and turn on "Sliding Up" (Format->Set Sliding/Printing...). This may work for a simple print layout.

Sometimes sliding portals get cut off by page breaks, so if this happens, you may have to build the print layout in a layout based on the related table using a columnar report with sub-summary parts. Based on your screenshot, this shouldn't be too hard.

Thank you very much. It is brillant.

I guess I just need to have the portal rows higher than the person with the most numbers, and use the sliding like you said. It works great!!!

The only catch is, if you have a portal where the highest number of rows needed is 20, and some records only need a couple rows, your layout will have to accomidate the a portal needing 20 rows. Then on most of the records displayed there will be quite a bit of dead space displayed until you see the next record. Unless there is some way to make the extra space slide up.

Thank you very much

Dave C

Use the "Also reduce the size of the enclosing part" option in the Sliding/Printing dialog.

Excellent!!

Thank you very much..

I have a tougher question one if you are up to it, I have to figure out which section to post it in.

Dave C