Use Rectangles to layout your data

Can’t using SSRS be limiting at times?  There you are trying to draw a simple rectangle in a table and the cell just keeps setting the rectangle to be the size of the cell – but you want it another size!  As originally posted.

The trick here is to remember there is nothing stopping you adding another rectangle inside this first rectangle

1. Add a rectangle to the cell in your table (yellow background in the screenshot below)
2. Add a rectangle inside this rectangle, and set its BorderStyle to Solid and BorderWidth to 2pt (red background in the screenshot below)
3. Finally Insert a textbox showing you expression to the inner rectangle (blue background in the image below.

This will give a layout as shown

That when the report is run will appear as follows

You can then resize this item to be the size you require for your report.