Simon Jones explains how to put business information into the hands of your employees thanks to Report Builder

Microsoft SQL Server is great for storing departmental or company data. It is fast and reliable, with the capability to expand from a hand-held device to a data centre. It can hold virtually any amount of data but what about getting data out again?

SQL Server Reporting Services together with Report Builder make it very easy to create good-looking, easy-to-understand reports and publish them so everyone in your company can have up-to-date, reliable information whenever they need it.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) produces reports to be viewed on screen, printed on demand or exported in any of several different formats. You can, for instance, export a report to Excel for further analysis or to a PDF file, if you wanted an unalterable copy for an archive. You can also set up a subscription to any report to have it emailed, to you or anyone else, or output to a designated folder, on a regular schedule. This option is very useful for getting the weekly sales figures sent to you automatically every Friday evening or having monthly reports generated at 08:00 on the first day of every month, ready for your 10:00 review meeting. Each user can easily control their own subscriptions so they get the information necessary to do their job when they need it.

Every edition of SQL Server from the free Express edition to the top-of-the-range Parallel Data Warehouse edition uses the same reporting language and tools. Technical users can define reports using the powerful Business Intelligence Design Studio (BIDS) which is based on Visual Studio but, for less technical users, Microsoft makes Report Builder. Both BIDS and Report Builder are free for any licenced SQL Server users.

A Quick Guide to Report Builder - 2013

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A QUICK GUIDE TO Report Builder

Report Builder is perfect for self-service report generation. If a user wants to create a new report, for themselves or their department, they don’t have to wait until the IT department has time to service the request. With very little training, users can create their own reports and publish them for use by their department or the rest of the company.

When you install SQL Server you get a major choice of where to store your SSRS Report Definitions. You can either store them in a stand-alone SSRS Intranet site or choose to integrate Reporting Services with an existing SharePoint site. SharePoint is Microsoft’s collaboration environment which you can use to build departmental or company-wide Intranet sites for storing frequently-used data and documents. You can use SharePoint Online, through an Office 365 subscription, or install it on your own servers. SharePoint Foundation comes free with Windows Server. Its bigger brother, SharePoint Server, costs money but does considerably more.

A QUICK GUIDE TO Report Builder

The stand-alone Reporting Services web site works well, allowing you to define folders of reports and set security so only the right people can run each report but integrating with SharePoint gives you much more. You get the familiar look and feel of the SharePoint UI, one place to look for all your data rather than two separate sites and you can define your own meta-data to go with each report. That means, for instance, that you can designate a contact person for each report, give the report a complete description and categorize reports the way you want them. All this meta-data is searchable so users can find reports much more easily which means people are less likely to waste time duplicating reports that already exists. Click on the Reports Library and type a couple of key words in the search box and SharePoint will list all the different reports, to which you have access, that might be of interest.

Report Builder has several wizards to help you in creating reports or you can start from a blank report once you’re comfortable using the application. The wizards help you create simple tabular reports, charts or maps. You can also layout a report using text boxes, lines, images, etc to create business documents such as invoices or purchase orders. Data for your reports can come from SQL Server, SQL Azure, a SharePoint list or another source such as SAP, Oracle or any other database for which there is an OLE DB or ODBC driver.

A QUICK GUIDE TO Report Builder

The wizards walk you through the process of selecting which fields you want to see from which tables by building a SQL Query. You don’t have to know Transact-SQL, the language used by SQL Server but it does help to have meaningful table and field names and to know your way around your own database.

Report Builder will help by automatically detecting relationships between tables where it can and even aliasing field names so you don’t get three fields all called “Name” and two called “Description”. You can add filters to your query to restrict the amount of data returned by the server.

You can also set up grouping and aggregates if you only want to see summary data such as total sales for each customer. It is much more efficient to set up the aggregates in the query than it is, for instance, to return every invoice in the table and then only display totals for each customer. If, however, you want to be able to drill down into the data, you may want to return all the invoice data but show just the totals and hide the detail until the user asks to expand a section.

When you create a filter you can tick a box to say that this is to be a parameter of the report so users are prompted to enter this whenever the report is run. This is good for setting date ranges or having a report which just covers a particular product range or a division of your company.

Parameters can have default values and/or a range of possible values the user can chose from. Once you’ve created your query you can arrange the fields quickly on the page by dragging them to the row groups, column groups and values boxes. Set up sub-totals and grand totals and say if you want the groupings to expand and collapse. You can also quickly choose a style to set the colour scheme.

Once you’ve been through the wizard, the main design surface lets you adjust the design of your report, adding headings, changing column widths, set properties for any object and so on. You can format numbers as currency, change the fonts, colours or borders on your table or add headers and footers to the report to show when it was printed, page numbers or parameters. You can add charts or gauges to help people visualize the data more easily.

A QUICK GUIDE TO Report Builder

You can also add data bars, sparklines or indicators to the data just as you can in Excel. If you have spatial data, such as the locations of customers, held as coordinates in SQL Server’s geography data types, you can map this data as points overlaid on a road map or satellite photography from Bing maps. Other data can also be combined with maps to show, for instance, a bubble map of sales by city or perhaps using different coloured markers to show top selling product ranges by country.

You can run your report inside Report Builder as you make your final adjustments so you can see how your changes look before you publish it. Save the report to your SSRS Report Server or to a SharePoint Report Library and anyone with the appropriate security rights will be able to run it or subscribe to it.

You can report all the detail or summarize the data in your report. You can even arrange for reports to expand to show more detail when you click on the figures or call other reports to allow users to drill-down into the data. If you need more capabilities than are provided by Report Builder, you can hand your report over to an IT professional who can enhance the report using Business Intelligence Design Studio, the pro report design tool that uses the same report format.

FURTHER READINGGetting started with Report Builder Microsoft’s official starter’s guide Report Builder 3.0 Quick Reports How to create visualisations and data comparisons straight out of the box. Video guide by Microsoft (5:28)SSRS: Sparklines, Bar Charts, and Indicators Reporting Services Program Manager Sean Boon demonstrates new data visualizations in Report Builder 3.0 that help communicate trends and status: sparklines, data bars, and indicators. Video guide by Microsoft (4:01)