I ran into the same problem and managed to solve it. The solution seems a little convoluted to me so don't quote me on the "right" way to do this, but here is what I did:
- Make sure you have a Dataset defined for your report.
- Add a "Table" control to the report. This seems to be needed in order to iterate the rows in your Dataset.
- Delete the header row and two of the default columns from the table so that you are left with a single row with a single column.
- Expand the table to the width of your layout and make it as tall as you will need for your "free form" layout.
- By default, there is a TextBox inside the table cell. Right-click the empty table cell and choose "delete" to remove that TextBox.
- Drag a "Rectangle" control into the empty table cell. It seems to automatically "dock" to the width/height of the table cell.
- Now you should be able to drag the fields from your DataSet (TextBoxes, etc) into the Rectangle to produce the desired layout.
Note that I am in the early stages of using this approach so I'm not sure if I am going to hit any walls... but for a basic report that uses TextBoxes and a page break after each "row" it seems to be working ok.