There are many kinds of formatting
that you can apply to a report:
- The appearance of the report data, such as its font,
size, style (italic, bold, or underlined), color (of the foreground
and the background), position, and justification. You can also draw
boxes or lines around data. You can use these properties to emphasize
critical values and to draw attention to important data relationships.
You
can also select which character to use to mark decimal position,
using either a period (.) or a comma (,), to match the convention
of the country in which the report will be read. You can even choose
which character to use to represent a null value and missing data.
- Providing context for data by "framing" it, for example, with headings,
footings, subtotals, recaps, and customized column titles. You can include fields and
images within headings and footings. As with data, you can specify
a heading, footing, subtotal, subhead, subfoot, recap, and column title font, size, style, color, position,
and justification, as well as enclose it within boxes or lines.
You can use these framing devices to explain the context of the
data and to engage the interest of the reader.
- Laying out the report on the screen or printed page.
You can choose the report margins, where to place headings and footings,
where to place background images (watermarks), and how to arrange
the report columns (adjusting the space around and between columns,
adjusting column width and column order, and even stacking one column
above another to reduce report width). You can visually distinguish between
different columns, rows, or sort groups using color and lines. If
you wish, you can draw borders around parts of a report or around
the entire report.
You can lay out the report to optimize it for
different display environments such as screens of different sizes
and resolutions, and printed pages of different sizes. You can create
multiple report panes on a single page to print labels. You can
even combine several reports into a single file to display or print
them as a group.
- Conditionally formatting a report
based on the report data. You specify a condition that, at run time,
is automatically evaluated for each instance of the report component
you specify, such as each value of a sort column. The formatting
option is applied to each instance of the report component for which
the condition is true. For example, in a sales report, you can draw
attention to sales staff who exceeded quota by making their names
bold and using a different color.
- Choosing a display format, such as HTML (the default), PDF
(Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format), Excel, or PostScript,
to suit the viewing and processing needs of the readers.