Crystal designer features I can't find in SSRS

Coming from a Crystal background, I was assessing SSRS 2005 and ran into
two things I know will generate a lot of pushback from my coworkers. In
Crystal you can place group heading fields anywhere you want in a group
band, where as grouping appears to be accomplished in SSRS by consuming
an entire table column. I suppose I could fake it by making the detail
of the main report contain my grouping data and render the detail with a
sub-report, but that's overkill for such a common formatting feat.
Example (note the horizontal positioning of the group field):
Crystal lets us do this:
Group1
Detail1 Detail2 Detail3 Detail4
SSRS tables require me to group like this:
Group1
Detail1 Detail2 Detail3 Detail4
I would be thrilled if I'm just overlooking something obvious and you
can place a group heading anywhere you want.
Also, we recreate paper forms in some reports (invoices, POs, etc.) and
positioning of drawn lines and text is *much* easier when you zoom in
with the designer to 200%. I didn't see how to do this in SSRS
designer, what am I missing?
RobYou can always drag a field to be displayed on the group heading. infact
Group heading can be merged as well. So your way of empty column is avoided.
On the designer there is no Zooming but on the output you can zoom. So
basically WYSIWYG format on the designer.
Amarnath
"Rob Gamble" wrote:
> Coming from a Crystal background, I was assessing SSRS 2005 and ran into
> two things I know will generate a lot of pushback from my coworkers. In
> Crystal you can place group heading fields anywhere you want in a group
> band, where as grouping appears to be accomplished in SSRS by consuming
> an entire table column. I suppose I could fake it by making the detail
> of the main report contain my grouping data and render the detail with a
> sub-report, but that's overkill for such a common formatting feat.
> Example (note the horizontal positioning of the group field):
> Crystal lets us do this:
> Group1
> Detail1 Detail2 Detail3 Detail4
>
> SSRS tables require me to group like this:
> Group1
> Detail1 Detail2 Detail3 Detail4
>
> I would be thrilled if I'm just overlooking something obvious and you
> can place a group heading anywhere you want.
> Also, we recreate paper forms in some reports (invoices, POs, etc.) and
> positioning of drawn lines and text is *much* easier when you zoom in
> with the designer to 200%. I didn't see how to do this in SSRS
> designer, what am I missing?
>
> Rob
>