With your help, I discovered how to save a conciderable amount of wasted space when running a report by using the "Reduce size of the enclosing part" feature, which is a wonderful thing. But, I still have a bit of empty space showing up. Is there a default amount of "part" that will always show up or is there a way to omit the enclosing part completely when nothing is in the part?

Any vertical section of a Part that is not covered by a field will not shrink. If you have whitespace above and below a text field, and the text field is set to slide up and reduce the size of the enclosing part, then an empty text field will cause the section it's covering to vanish, but the whitespace above and below will remain.

One way around this is to place copies of the text field above and below the original, resized to exactly cover the whitespace vertically (horizontally doesn't matter). Change the background and text colors to that of the background, so that they are invisible in Preview mode. Set all the fields to slide up. Now, when the text field is empty, the entire Part will slide up and dissappear.

Another approach is to use a calc field that returns a space if the text field is not empty, blank if it is empty:

spacer(calc,text)= If( IsEmpty(textField), "", " " )

Place copies of this field in the whitespace above and below the text field. Change the text size of the spacer field to exactly fill the whitespace vertically. Set all the fields to slide up.

Another little thing about sliding -- header parts won't shrink. I know, it stinks, but that's the way it is.

Dan,

According to the FM Help, this applies to footers as well, but I could have sworn that I've made a footer shrink before! But now I can't make my footer part shrink. Can you/someone confirm this?

Does anyone have a workaround if shrinking doesn't work for footers?

Thanks,

Daniel