I'm just starting to use the Report creator so please forgive me if I ask some dumb newbie questions.  I figured I'd start by examining the reports that got brought over when I translated my databases from Q&A.

In my Employee database I have a report which lists the employee's name and Social Security Number.  In Q&A the first column, Name, is a derived column which combines the values of the stored Lastname and Firstname (with a comma in the middle).  The derived comumn definition can be seen in the Q&A inset of this picture:
http://www.jamiara.com/screenshot1.jpg

The resulting report structure of the translation in Sesame's Report Writer can also be seen in that picture.

When run, the report produces the following:
http://www.jamiara.com/screenshot2.JPG
(I've elided the SS#'s, of course).

A couple of questions arise:

1. How does Sesame's Report Writer know it needs to combine Lastname and Firstname?  I cannot see anything in the report's structure that shows me this is occurring or how it's done, though it clearly is working.  (A search of the  manuals for "derived colums" has no results.)  From the looks of the report structure I would expect 4 columns with 2 headers.  My understanding is probably wrong so I would appreciate any clarification.

2. My Q&A report specified no particular column width for Name, so I would expect that Sesame would do the same, and there's plenty of room across the HTML page for the full derived name.  A look at the resulting HTML code (and Sesame's Property Viewer) shows a column width for Name as 90 (which makes it wrap) and a column width for SS as 84.  Are these defaults of some kind?  The other column widths are Lastname=98 and Firstname=108.

3. Column width properties...what are these in proportion to?  Is there a formula for determining the best width in relation to the amount of text in a field?

Thanks for any help.