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Create Your First Report

Use this tutorial to create your first report in the Web Report Designer. You will create an empty report, connect it to a web service, add a table, and verify the result in the preview.

What You Will Build

In this tutorial, you create a simple report that:

Connects to a Telerik demo web service
Displays data in a formatted table
Can be previewed and exported

Before You Start

Make sure you have access to:

A running instance of the Telerik Web Report Designer where you can create a new report.
A data source to feed the report with data. This tutorial uses a Telerik demo web service, but you can also work with SQL, CSV, GraphQL, and other supported data sources.

This tutorial uses the Telerik demo web service endpoint. If your environment cannot reach external URLs, replace it with a web service endpoint that your Web Report Designer instance can access.

Creating the Report and Connecting It to Data

Create a new empty report by clicking New Report in the main menu:
On the Components tab, go to Data Sources and select Web Service Data Source:

Alternatively, you can type "Web Service Data Source" in the Search box to let the designer locate the tool for you.
On the Configure Data Retrieval screen, enter the URL of the web service providing the data for your report and then click Finish.
text
```
https://demos.telerik.com/reporting/api/data/productsales
```

Now you have a blank report that is connected to data. The design surface remains empty at this stage because you have not added any report items yet.

Adding Items to Your Report

Next, design the report by adding a Table report item to display your data.

Click the report's Detail section to select it as the target container for the report item. If the report itself stays selected, Table and Table Wizard remain unavailable.

If Table Wizard is unavailable, click inside the Detail section again and confirm that the section border is selected before continuing.
Select the Components tab, and then click the Table Wizard button:
Configure the table as illustrated in the animation below. Select the fields you want to display and arrange them in the table columns:
Optional: Style the table from the APPEARANCE section in the Properties panel:
Click Preview in the upper-right corner to confirm that the report loads data from the web service and renders the table:

If the preview is empty, confirm that the report uses the correct web service URL and that the Web Report Designer instance can reach that endpoint.

You have successfully created your first report with the Web Report Designer.

Next Steps

Now that you have created your first report, you can:

Add more report items such as charts, images, and text boxes
Explore supported data source types in the Web Report Designer
Learn how report sections organize your report content
Refine the layout with the Table Wizard in the Web Report Designer

For a visual walkthrough, watch this video tutorial that demonstrates creating a report with a chart. The video covers the Visual Studio setup initially, but the Web Report Designer portion starts at the 3:08 mark: