I read this, it was a great article!
it answered my question, but before I adopt it i wanted to know if this has been addressed in SSRS2008 so as to eliminate the calculations in the database and all done by groups and extra colmns right inside SSRS 2008.
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Reporting+Services+%28SSRS%29/63415/
thanks for your help
drew