Help With suppression in Report

[RG52]

Hello All I need some help:

I have a small DB in access that has data entered via text boxes on a form. It is for confirming orders and such. There are five sets of entry boxes simply listed as Size, Qty, Num(not same as qty), Size II, Qty II, Num II, Size III you get the idea. Only the first set is required to be entered, and the remaing ones can be left blank (at least one or two will be 99% of the time). The text boxes all update to the Table properly. When I run a query it displays everything including the fields that have no data, which in turn means the reports I need to run have blank lines in them. How do I suppress the fields that have no data entered so they don't show on the report leaving a bunch of unwanted and unnecessary white space? I have tried IsNull in the criteria of the fields through the query, but that seems to eliminate all records except ones that have info in the four sets of unreqiured text boxes(not all records have more than one set of data entered due to order size). I hope this makes sense. If there is not a way to do this (I feel there is) could a work around like setting a default value for each of the unrequired boxes be put in and then set th query/report to output where (field) not = XXXX? Thanks in advance for your help.

[RG52]

Anyone got any ideas on this?

[OldBirdman]

First, I would start with http://bytes.com/topic/access/insights/585228-database-normalization-table-structures.

You haven't given your table structure other that these repeating sets of fields. What other fields are in the table?

[RG52]

Old Bird thanks for the respose

Simple customer info like biz name, phone #, address, distributor is in the table with most info simply being text. The primary key is an autonumber generated by Access because there are multiple instances of the same customer due to repeat orders (thankfully). It has been working fine with only set of inputs but when a I needed add couple of fields (check box and a another textbox), so I figured add add the capability of adding mulitple products with out having to go to a new record and re-enter all the customer data. As I said the form puts the info inside the table correctly I just can seem to figure out how to get it back out in a report the way I'd like.

[OldBirdman]

You don't mention normalization. Did you attempt to read the link?

You should have a customer table, with

Simple customer info like biz name, phone #, address, distributor

and an order table with

Size, Qty, Num(not same as qty)

Your reports would be based on a query joining the 2 tables. Where repeat orders not 5, then orders table would have the correct number of rows, even 6+ thankfully.

I believe planning should preceed design, and I think if you go the direction you have started, you will never get your project working correctly.