What is the best way to set-up test cases in a linear way

Custom reports would be a 'no' strictly speaking because you can't define the report output, but, you can use the custom query filter option which is powerful enough to get the data you want, and, you can see any custom fields in the dataset of the report (if not the report itself) when you export the data.  I believe the SmartBear team are working on the reports section and hope to see some improvements coming in a future release