Using Report Templates to Reduce Report Creation Effort

So far in this hour, the focus has been on new features and functions that can be used to create templates. Templates can accomplish many of the more intense designer-related tasks, including

• Conditional formatting

• Field highlighting

• Page headers/footers

• Charting standards

• Lines/boxes/borders

• Color standards

• Logos and images

• Web sites/hyperlinks/email addresses

• Standard custom functions

• Repository objects

• Locking size or position of any object

• Special fields

Applying Multiple Templates

Because any report could be used as a template, it is also conceivable that many reports could be applied to any single report as a template.

This can prove quite useful if the templates are doing different things. For example, one template might be applying the standard page headers and footers to all reports within a company, whereas another template could be used to apply department-based colors to the details section. Because both templates are encapsulated separately, they can be applied separately and will not affect each other. The end result is one report with both the corporate style (headers and footers) as well as the specific department's colors (in the Details section) applied.

Templates can be applied repeatedly, even if new fields are added to the report after the initial template was applied.

Simply choose Reapply Template in the Template Expert to have the template address any new fields.