What is Report Designer?

Report Designer is the heart of reporting tool providing a guided flow for report creation and styling.
A complete reporting tool has an easily accessible and intuitive report designer that requires minimal training to use. Report Designer provides a graphical interface where developers or users can define data sources, datasets and queries, report layout positions for different data fields and interactive features as parameters and sets of reports that work together, etc. The designer typically provides numerous styling capabilities, such as conditional formatting, CSS-like styling and countless wizards to help users create complex report layouts, style reports, manipulate data and build visually appealing presentations. By using data-bound items like maps, charts, crosstabs and sub reports, users can present interactive report decks and other elements (dashboards, reports by region, invoices, inventory reports, barcode reports and much more).

There are different types of report designers - desktop, web-based, etc.

Desktop report designer enables developers and users to start from scratch with easy drag and drop design or use the huge library with pre-defined templates. It gives the opportunity to create, design, edit, preview, save, export and print reports seamlessly and without any code.

Web report designer has easy-to-use, fine-graded drag-and-drop functionality to layout and re-parent all items and sections. It features most functionalities of desktop report designers but adding more. One of its main benefits laid in enabling developers and report authors to bring report editing functionality to their end-users right from their web applications.

Visual Studio report designer targets developers that prefer VS for report authoring. It works with .NET type report definitions (.CS or .VB files). VS report designer enables adding and editing of charts, tables and groups as well filling them with data, styling, sharing and export for ready reports.

One of the core features of report designers is report styling. The designer typically provides numerous styling capabilities, such as conditional formatting, CSS-like styling and countless wizards to help users create complex report layouts, style reports beautifully, manipulate data and build visually appealing presentations. By using data-bound items like maps, charts, crosstabs and sub reports, users can present interactive report decks and other elements (dashboards, reports by region, invoices, inventory reports, barcode reports and much more). Then the reports can be seamlessly embedded, viewed, and exported in any kind of format.

If you need a full-functional reporting tool, try Telerik Reporting.

Telerik Reporting is a powerful easy-to-use embedded .NET reporting solution for web and desktop applications that supports: ASP.NET Core, Blazor, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET AJAX, HTML5, Angular, React, Vue, WPF, WinForms. Reporting enables creation, styling, viewing and export of rich, interactive and reusable reports to attractively present analytical and any business data. The reports can be added to any business application through report viewer controls and exported in more than 15 formats.

You can evaluate and see all the benefits of Telerik Reporting by downloading a 30-day free trial. Doing so will get you access to our support with response time of less than 24 hours. The trial will also provide you with detailed resources to make the Getting started experience as smooth as possible.

For more information about report designers, visit our report designers page.