# Database Discussions > Microsoft Access >  Help with database reports

## Gandolfe1963

My team ( 4 other students) are designing a Database for school that is a registry of all databases on the campus. We are almost finished but are running into problems with the reports.
This is our problem....

I'm not sure you understand Tony. I typed the fields that way in database management with all the extra letters. The point of typing them that way was to test if entering the entire amount (52 characters) or whatever it is would cause the report to show missing data. For instance if your field size was 256 the field would go off the page and overflow. I was making sure the field is small enough to fit on the page but large enough to hold the maximum amount of data without going over the page.

I found no other way for reports to not show blank spaces when there is missing data, other than to write an error code. The fields can't shrink if there is no data and I couldn't find a code to work. If there was a code it would go like this; 
if txtname = null or "" then, txtname and txt(count and type I forget what it's called).visible = false. 

Everything I tried does not work. The report will still generate blank spaces where data should be. If I put all fields as required in tbldatabase then it would show correctly but wouldn't offer the flexibility that is needed in this kind of environment 

 Would using a filter or pop-up requiring user t enter an * at end of Database name and then coding it to limit space used to null after * work? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to email me if you have a solution.
Thank You

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## Allan Murphy

Set the Can Grow property of the field to Yes. When the data does not fit on one line the field grows i.e. the words start on a new line.

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