Posted by Because I got a few reactions regarding the screenshots below (people thought something was wrong with the screenshots) please note that :
Some of the screenshots below look awful because I selected all the text in the matrices with CTRL-A. I did this to make the differences in row heights clear to see. I also made the numbers in the matrix unreadable.
Problem:
As you can see in the screenshot below the row height of rows that contain empty cells differ from the rows where all cells contain data. Screenshot below is taken from IE(with all rows selected), when I run the report in BIDS preview it renders fine!
I think this is strange if you look at the properties of the rows during the problems:
Can Grow and CanShrink are set to False so you won’t expect cells heights to grow or shrink. It seems the problem is that SSRS gives empty cells a row height of 0,25(the default) and I use a row height of 0,20. Result is that everything goes fine until there are rows with empty cells. What’s also very strange is that when I made a print of the report, the row heights were all fine!!
Solution:
When I faced this problem I just tried a couple of things and it seemed the padding property gave an outcome. When I run the report with the following properties for the rows it renders fine and there are no problems:
As you can see in the screenshot from IE below, the row heights are fine now!
Conclusion:
It seems that when you
a) have a matrix with cells that can be empty
b) you use a row height that’s smaller then the default of 0,25
you need to use the following properties for your rows in the matrix to prevent problems:
· Padding: 2,2,0,0
· VerticalAlign: Middle
· CanGrow: False
· CanShrink: False
What makes this strange to me is that a print of the report and preview of the report in BIDS did not show differences in row heights but Internet Explorer did. This problem occurred with IE 7 and a SQL Server 2005 installation with SP and updates installed.
Jorg Klein's Blog 
Your article was extremely helpful. Have been hitting a wall on why the rendered report was not responding to the height changes I was making. The changes you suggested worked perfectly. Thank you!
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Jorg,
I appreciate the article, but I tried your solution and still had issues unfortunately. So, I kept messing with things and here’s what I figured out…. My main problem was that I had the vertical alignment set to Bottom. You have that mentioned in your article, but I had just the right combination of things such that changing the vertical alignment did not help anything. I had to change the size of the table row to get it to affect anything. So, I had to do the following: (like I said, changing the alignment alone had no effect)
1. Change the height of the row from 0.20 to 0.25.
2. Change the alignment to Top
3. Change the height of the row from 0.25 to 0.20.
4. Deploy the report.
I think what happens is that the behavior in VS (way deep down in the process / stack) does not evaluate how to handle the text unless you change the row height. That is my hypothesis, anyways. As long as I had the vertical align set to Bottom, my settings for CanGrow were completely ignored. Middle align didn’t help either, it had to be set to Top.
In any case, I realize this post was over 5 years old, but maybe if anybody has this same problem, this might help… If you can’t get Can Grow to respond to what you’re doing, try changing the row height temporarily to see if that causes some changes.
Thanks!
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