Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Reporting Services

Chapter 5. Basic Report Design

If you are new to Reporting Services, you'll get started in this chapter with some basic report design concepts. If you have had prior experience with earlier versions of Reporting Services, you may be able to skip ahead after we introduce a few things that have recently changed. In order to meet the needs of those readers who are new to the product and also those who have done report design with SQL Server 2000 or 2005, we have organized this section on report design to make it easy for you to learn what you need without having to read each of these chapters from start to finish. Using this approach, you also shouldn't have to learn about all the low-level details if you simply want to know the basic steps. But you also shouldn't have to read through an elementary introduction of the topic if you are ready to take on advanced report design.

Part II, "Report Design," consists of the following four chapters:

• Chapter 5 introduces the report design environment and then teaches you the essentials of the report design elements. The theme of this chapter is what you can do, rather than how to do it. You'll learn the fundamental components and building blocks: data sources, datasets, report body, report items, data ranges, and page layout properties. You'll see how to use the Report Wizard to get started with common report design features. In this chapter, you will learn to use both the new Report Builder 2.0 designer and the integrated development report designer ...