How can I reduce the amount of text displayed in a row on a report field?

We have a report which needs to show the top line of the description field in an issue. However, with the way that the description is utilised for historic data we have 10 rows of text.

This makes the report formatting very difficult to work with for the end users.

Is there any way to limit the number of characters in a column that get returned, disable text wrapping, define maximum row height in a column or another way of handling this that I've not thought of yet!