Display Details in Two Columns?

[nlaliberte]

I'm using Crystal XI and a SQL Server via an ODBC connection.

What I'd like to do is display my details section in two columns instead of one. The report this is for is a Contact report, and basically displays addresses like you would find on a mail envelope:

Contact
Company
Address 1
Address 2
City, State Zip


Currently these fields correspond to DetailA, DetailB, DetailC, DetailD, and DetailE and the report produces one address on top of the other.

This leaves alot of white space on the right side of the page and the end user would like to list the contacts in two rows, i.e.;

Contact_1 Contact_2
Company_1 Company_2
Address1_1 Address1_2
Address2_1 Address2_2
City,_State_Zip_1 City,_State_Zip_2


Does anyone have any idea on how to do this. My only idea is to hardcode in a set number of contacts and give them each their own set of fields, thus returning one detail line with all of the information instead of a line for each contact. This seems like an awful lot of work for this solution though.

Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[kernal]

I use crystal 9 with csv file but this might work for your report.

What about having the report as mailing labels (I have the mailing label type "Avery 5161" as one of my options and that has 2 labels across)? You can then have them across then down or down then across.

Group by contact then the contacts will be order (then hide or suppress the group header and footer). If you need to make some margin adjustments, etc. to the labels. You can do that by selecting the main detail section in the section expert and you should see a "Layout" tab so you can size the details, gap between details, etc.