Form Letter Report Keeps 'growing' in size -- Help!

[Anke]

Okay,
  I know this sounds bizarre, but I have a report that is a form letter with several different columsn and a list inside it.  My original report is great, but, of course, the end user would like to have a slight variation of the original.  Easy enough, I simply copied the original, gave it a new name and made my changes. 
   As I was making the changes, I would run the report in PDF and print it.  I started noticing, the print kept getting a little bigger each time I would make changes and save.  Weird  ???.  Well, I went back serveral hours late, not knowing what to do at that point and then report was fine.  Life went on... until yesterday, when again, they wanted some changes.  I have another 'growing' report issue.

    Has anyone seen anything like this before?  I have tried changing the properties and what not, to no avail.  This is just too weird.  I didn't even know what to try to search on to see if there has been a similar post before.


    Any suggestions??  We are on Cognos 8.2, and it is in Report Studio, I have one prompt page and one report page.

Thanks,
Anke

[John_Russell]

I too ran into the "auto-sizing" column issue, and when I brought it to Cognos' attention, they found that it was a "known issue" in 8.x, but that the problem was related to the version of IE7 I was using.  The support rep had the following to say about the problem:

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After further research I have found out that this issue has been logged before and it is related to the Microsoft IE 7. There is a hotfix available from Microsoft.
Please follow the link for the resolution.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/936949
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For what it's worth, upgrading IE solved this "growing" problem.

For referene, here is my original posting to them:

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While working one new or upgraded reports in the Cognos 8 BI 8.3 Report Studio, any column you have selected gets "padded" if you minimize/maximize the Report Studio window.  It's a very annoying "feature"!

As you look more closely at what is happening, you can tell from the properties for the column, that the "Padding" property  is being incrementally updated (all by itself) with a string like this "? ? ? 20px".

This will happen for any column/column header you have selected.  The only way to correct the problem (as it will save like this), is to remove the value from the Padding dialog, click Apply and then save the report.
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[Anke]

WOW!  That is great news!  I am going to see if there is an upgrade.  We just updated to IE7 a couple of weeks ago, so I am hoping I can get the fix!
Thanks,
Anke

DIDN'T WORK.  Okay, I went and updated on microsoft.com and nada...it didn't fix the issue.  Well, my computer is now up-to-date and  I have my Biggie Size report.  DARN... how can I resolve this issue?  My report spans 2 pages now.


Anke