Knight's Microsoft® Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer: Leveraging Microsoft SQL Server® Integration, Analysis, and Reporting Services with Excel® and SharePoint®

194



LESSON 21 Understanding ssrs

Notice that the report will need a few adjustments to fix the format of the data. For example, the

List Price and Standard Cost columns are not formatted to look like currency, and the date columns

show the time. Click the Design tab, which is next to the Preview tab, and you can fix some of these

problems.

Right-click SellEndDate in the table. (Make sure you are clicking the data and not the header. The

data is below the header and has square brackets around the label.) Select Text Box Properties. Click

Number in the left-hand pane. Then click Date under Category and select the date format labeled

1/31/2000, shown in Figure 21-9. Click OK and repeat the same steps for SellStartDate.

FIGURE 219

Right-click ListPrice and select Text Box Properties again. Click Number in the left-hand pane.

Then click Currency under Category, leave the default settings, and click OK. Perform the same

steps on StandardCost. Drag the right-hand side of the Name column to the right to increase the

width of the columns. This will prevent the product names from word-wrapping on the report.

Now preview the report and it should resemble the one in Figure 21-10.

You now know where the essential tools for report-building are in BIDS. The ability to query the

needed data is crucial in creating reports. Each report you build in BIDS will start with a data

source and a data set ...