Well, that was a work-around and would work for normal text fields that would usually contain comments or some other things that you'd like to trim (for example your house-example in the qustion). I'm not clear what you're trying to achieve with abcdefg thing. If you have 7 characters and two lines it will depend on the width and height of your textbox I'd say. You should do an estimation or a guess - whatever you liek to call it - to how many characters you'd like to accomodate in your text-box. And just cut the rest of it and add three dots. That's how you can do in Reporting Services.
