Making Presentation-Quality Reports

Up to this point in the book, the focus of the chapters has been on making sure that the data appears as required. The next step, formatting, keeps users coming back to the reports time and time again.

Formatting can take many different forms, from basic font coloring to hyperlinks to conditional formatting (based on the data coming back from the database). This chapter examines a cross-section of all these types of formatting to give the report developer a good basis for report formatting.

This chapter presents a series of tutorials to enable you to actually add formatting to a report started in an earlier chapter. Let's assume that you would like to improve the report that was started in Chapter 6, “Fundamentals of Report Formatting.”