I recently had a question about layout in reporting services. Basically if you use a table you get a vertical layout, like this:
| First Name | Last Name |
| Brad | Pitt |
| Bill | Gates |
| Linus | Trovalds |
But what if you want to go horizontally? Sure there could be UI issues because the report will get wider and wider with more data getting put in and it could influence the quality of export or printing but in a special scenario it would be very useful. Unfortunately the tablix control (Table + Matrix + List in 2008. See my post on what’s new for more info) does offer this natively :( But using a trick you can get around it. First you need a tablix in matrix format (i.e. drag a matrix onto the form), and then add a new column header for each column, but rather than putting a header text in there you put the data in there. You ignore the rows and data cells (in fact you can hide them by setting the hidden property to true).
And the output is a horizontal layout of data:
