Thank you for taking the time to make your point. I will must was showing a lack of patience and frustration myself.

As soon As I do find a solution I will not just post a reply I will attempt to have a document available.

This is an interesting subject actually. People I find who have SSRS thrust on them lean on the near by for guidance have little patience for learning the product. Well, let me explain, I work in a shop where the M.S. guru fled, leaving me to defend and attempt to promote the products. Anyway, what I see are people who do not really learn the product first, time or not. I see at work one person using stored procedures and views, why, because someone else did before her. Now a SQL contract happens by for awhile. He is not an SSRS expert, so he throws out his preferences. I am sure you have seen the same. So we must strive to direct people toward the product itself.

Granted this can be a bit difficult due to the lack of Reference books. In the COBOL/JCL/CICS world, in general I just needed good reference book for each. The same with DB2/SQL. Then again, I need not need to be the administrator, etc.

In the M.S. world there are so many books, 'how tos', but not many like those few yellow, white and black Osborne Complete References. The one's for Crystal and SharePoint where very handy for me. Of course, they still do not contain everything.

With SSRS one needs a guide that states, this is a Table, this how it works, this is a List, a Rectangle, a Matrix, etc. Instead we have how tos that display one use and do not often answer our question. So we search the the net for videos and M.S. how tos, that still come up short and do not give a Tech explanation.

So, we hack away and we goggle - The forums. I have supported Heat by Frontrange. That is a help desk software. Some from the company used to go in to the forums and actually reply about - well, if you go to the registry,etc. Well, there go. Some one giving good detail. As an admin for the product I was not about to touch the Registry, but I can not complain the person was informative.

You do mention a good point. Design. Only not for queries but the report itself. I inherited this report from someone and since the report was for one student at a time, that is how I designed the report. Some Textboxes and tables at the top showing contact info and Basic info (one dataset) A table with some enrolment info (DS two), a table with FCAT scores (DS3) a table with current classes (DS4) a table with history (DS5).

That was all fine for one at a time. The parameter at the top is student ID and school year. Of course the history table can have no rows or many (That No Rows option is cool in properties. Just type some text for no rows).

So this is a powerful ability of SSRS.

Now, oh, I want all the ninth grade. oops. I did not design the report for that, did I. So I am wondering about throwing it all in a List or Rectangle but how do I reference the other datasets in the List since a list want to be associated with a data set ( I have not tried the rectangle yet), etc.

If I do find a solution that works, I will let you know and I will attempt not to be cryptic.

OK, good hacking.