6. Advanced Options
Important: The most current version of the Report Design Wizard does not contain steps 6 and 7.
The Advanced Options step allows you to setup some high level report details like row banding, grid lines, and fonts.
Options
To improve the readability of your reports a convenient feature is row banding. This will alternate every other row of data with the selected background color. To turn row banding on select the "Use Row Banding" checkbox. Press the "Color.." button to launch the color chooser dialog to select the row banding color. This example does not use row banding, but you are welcomed to use it if you like.
Another nice thing to add to certain reports are gridlines. You can create horizontal and vertical gridlines and specify their colors.
The horizontal offset shifts the report to the right by the specified percentage of total space. This will move all report elements including group headers, column headers and the details section.
Expression Setup
The expression setup section is used to configure miscellaneous report features. Here you can choose to generate Grand Totals (calculations across all groups). For some financial reports the calculated values are underlined or double underlined. This can be configured by checking them on or off as needed.
Column Headers
Column Headers are technically created on the innermost group so their default values come from the settings of that group. This is mostly undesirable. To address this you can manually adjust the column header height and the column background color.
Font Setup
Fonts may be defined for all of the major parts of a report and a font preview is provided as well.
Include
There may be times when you have a group of related reports that share a common report or page header (for example) which exists as a separate definition (XML). This file may be included into the report to customize it in ways not possible with the wizard.
Screenshot showing Advanced Options