Chapter 7: Kicking It Up a NotchIntermediate Reporting

Overview

Basic training is at an end. Boot camp is over. You now know the basics of building reports in Reporting Services. You should be able to create reports both with the Report Wizard and from scratch. When needed, you can spice up your reports with color, images, and charts.

In the last chapter, you learned how to add punch to your reports with color and graphics. In this chapter, you learn how to add value to your reports through summarizing and totaling, and added interactivity. All this enhances the users’ experience and allows them to more readily turn information into business intelligence.

We begin the chapter, however, by looking for a way to enhance your experience as a report developer. In the first section, we create a report template that can be used to standardize the look of your reports. The report template can also take care of some of the basic formatting tasks, so they do not need to be repeated for each report.