Create a Simple Report with the Wizard

By: Ray Barley

Overview

In an earlier section we covered Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS), the tool that developers use to create reports.  BIDS provides a Report Designer which allows you to define every aspect of your report.  In addition BIDS provides a Report Wizard which will guide you through the steps to build a simple report.  With the Report Designer you start out with an empty canvas; you define every aspect of the report yourself.  When you are getting started with Reporting Services, the Report Wizard should be your first choice.  Once you've built a report with the wizard, you can continue customizing it with the Report Designer.  When you reach the point where you are comfortable defining every aspect of your reports and you want to build sophisticated reports and dashboards, then you should use the Report Designer.

In this section we will use the Report Wizard to build a simple report.  We will walk through the following steps:

• Launch the report wizard
• Create a shared data source
• Design a query
• Select a report type
• Design a table
• Choose the table layout
• Complete the wizard