Report Life Cycle (Report Builder 2.0)
This topic provides a high-level description of how to author, manage, and deliver reports using Report Builder 2.0.
Creating Reports
Report Builder 2.0 is a report authoring tool that runs on your local computer. You can create many different types of reports to meet your reporting needs, such as sales, marketing, and financial reports, by using combinations of tables, matrices, lists, and charts. You can then manipulate your data by filtering, grouping and sorting, and by adding expressions and parameters. After your report looks the way you want, you can publish it to a report server or a SharePoint site, where others within your organization can read it, or you can save it to your local computer.
To create a report in Report Builder 2.0, you can start by running the New Table or Matrix wizard or the New Chart wizard. In the wizards, you connect to a data source and define a dataset [query]. This dataset contains information about its data source, the fields that it contains, any filters, parameters, or groups that it contains, and any formatting information.
Before you start your first report, see Planning a Report (Report Builder 2.0). To get some practice before you create your own first report, see Tutorial: Creating a Quick Chart Report Offline (Report Builder 2.0) and Tutorial: Creating a Basic Table Report (Report Builder 2.0).
Managing Reports and Other Items
After you have created a report, you can save and run it on your local machine or in a personal folder called My Reports on a report server. When you're satisfied with it, you can publish its report definition (.rdl) file and any resource files, such as image files, to the report server directly from Report Builder 2.0.
Note
If you don't have a My Reports folder, contact your server administrator.
Published reports are managed on the report server by an administrator using the Reporting Services tool Report Manager. Report server administrators can define security, set properties, and schedule operations such as report history and e-mail report delivery. They can create shared schedules and shared data sources and make them available for general use. Administrators also manage all of the report server folders. The ability to perform management tasks depends on user permissions.
For more information, see Viewing and Managing Reports on a Report Server (Report Builder 2.0).
Accessing and Delivering Reports
Two methods are available for accessing and delivering reports created in Report Builder 2.0:
On-demand access allows you to select the reports from a report viewing tool. You can use Report Manager, a Microsoft SharePoint Web part, an embedded ReportViewer control, or a browser. For more information about on-demand access to reports, see Finding, Saving, and Managing Reports (Report Builder 2.0).
Subscription-based access automatically generates and delivers reports to a destination. You can use Report Manager to deliver reports to an e-mail inbox or a file share. For more information about creating a subscription, see How to: Subscribe to a Report in Report Manager (Report Builder 2.0).
Viewing Reports
Report Builder 2.0 supports a variety of viewing formats. Reports at first display in HTML format when they are run, but after a report is rendered you can redisplay the report in a different format such as Excel or PDF. For more information about rendering reports in different formats, see Exporting Reports (Report Builder 2.0).