Text of memo fields truncated in reports

[aplucini]

OS: Windows 7
Open Office 3.4.1

I'm trying to make the transition from Access 2007 to OOo Base. I've searched throughout this forum for other discussions of this problem but no luck finding helpful information.

I'm using Oracle Report Builder to design and create reports. With Access 2007 I was able to specify whether a field in a report could grow, meaning that even though the box containing the data is only one inch high, when the report is printed, the box will grow to as large as necessary to display all the text in that field. This is especially useful with memo fields that might contain several pages worth of text.

In Base, I can't figure out a way to make that field expand to display/print ALL the textual data in that field for that particular record. The text is truncated when there are more lines of text than will fit in the box created in design view. I don't want to make that box really large because then if there is only one line of text in that box then a lot of white space is printed in the report when only one line worth of space is needed. But the biggest problem is that most of the text is truncated because the box won't expand to display all the text.

This is even a problem in non-memo fields. For example an address field might contain multiple lines of data but only one line will fit in the field when printed. The other lines are truncated.

Interestingly, I've found in designing forms, that you can make the field expand or "grow" by stating that the field can display multiple lines. This is the same thing as the option to allow the field/box to "grow" in designing Access 2007 reports. Why can't I do this in OOo reports? If it is possible, then How?

[Villeroy]

You could disable the report builder and try the old style report which effectively dumps one row set into a Writer table. Cells of Writer tables adjust their size. When the report is finished you can enable the report builder again.
Calc can be (mis-)used in similar ways: http://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/vi ... 08#p253705

I don't know anything about the report builder. In fact I gave up on it.

[aplucini]

I finally found another thread in this forum about this issue. http://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/vi ... 514#p88895
This was back in 2009 and the answer was that this was not supported but a "planned feature". It's been 3 1/2 years and apparently it is still only a planned feature.