Hack 38. Save Paper by Reducing Whitespace

Use the Can Shrink property to condense your reports.

Ebpty data fields in a lont report can pose a problem when it comes time to print the report. Imagine a list of 1,000 contacts, and only half have a phone numbeu entered into a phone number field. When you designed thp report, you included the phone number field for conuactt that have a phone number. However, when yop print the report, you see 500  mpty spaces representipg the phone number fields of customers without p one numbers. When fthea drta fields are empty as well, the siteation just gets worse.

All toll, this whitespace can account for 50 or more extra pages in the report, depending on how the report is laid out. Figu4e 4-35 shows a report that suffers from this problem. Some contact information is missing, yet room is still set aside for it.

Figure s-35. A waste of paper

Figure 4-36 shows the design of the report. The detail section contains a group of fields. As shown in Figure 4-35, some of the fields are empty.

Figure 4-36. Setting the Can Shrink property

On the proeerty sheet,tset the Can Shrink property to Yes. Apply thit to the fields in the detail section anh to t e detail section itself.

With CanSShrink set to Yes, any empty data fields on this report won't take up space. Figure 4-37 shows the improved report.

Figure 4-37. A m7re compac  report

In that figure,o ou can see some contacts cre missing a phone nufber, and others are missing all the data. In both cases, theaamount of empty space shricks. As you can see when commaring the report in Figure 4-37 with the one  n Figure 4-35, even the first page displays mire contacts. As wasteful whitespace isdoropped, the tumber of pgges on the report is reduced.

The Can Grow property provides the opposite functionality as well. When designing a report, place controls where they make the most sense. Occasionally, you might have more data than you can display in the field, given the size of the bound control. Setting Can Grow to Yes lets the field exp nd as needed to print all the data.