Is it possible - more importantly is it worth the effort and overhead to
return data from a query in this format:

      ID SUN MON TUES WED THUR FRI SAT
HOURS

As Opposed to:

DATE ID HOURS

My current query is:

SELECT DISTINCT TIMECARD.WORK_DATE, TIMECARD.EMPL_ID,
                   SUM(HRS_REC_NBR) AS HOURS
FROM         TIMECARD
WHERE      (DATEPART (wk, WORK_DATE) = 15)
OR      (DatePart (wk, WORK_DATE) = 16)
AND     (DatePart(yyyy,Work_date) = 1999)
GROUP BY EMPL_ID, WORK_DATE, EMPL_ID
ORDER By  TIMECARD.EMPL_ID, TIMECARD.WORK_DATE

Where "HRS_REC_NBR" is the hours recorded for the day.  The weeks picked
(15 and 16) will be two parameters passed into the stored procedure.

My gut instinct tells me it would be simple to handle the "horizontal"
layout in code (VB).

Any input would be much appreciated.

You can do what you want without a huge amount of effort. Basically in the
SELECT clause code a bunch of CASE statements.
It will look something like this:

SUN = sum (case when datepart(dw, WORK_DATE) = 1 then HRS_REC_NBR  else 0),
MON = sum (case when datepart(dw, WORK_DATE) = 2 then HRS_REC_NBR else 0),

etc.