Formatting Reports: An Overview

To create an effective report, you need to account for:

• Content. The data in your report.
• Formatting. How to present that content to a reader in a way that achieves maximum impact.

There are many formatting options that you can use to give your report a professional appearance and affect how people read and interpret it. For example, you can control:

• The appearance of the data, which you can change to emphasize important values.
• The headings, footings, and other text with which you "frame" the data to give it context.
• The layout of the report on the page or screen, which you can adjust for different display environments and for audiences with different vision needs.

The following topics provide an overview of formatting tabular reports (including Financial Modeling Language reports) and free-form reports. For information about formatting graphs, see Creating a Graph.