(upbeat music)
Alright, welcome back.
We're now ready for module two,
now with the focus on designing report layouts.
In this module then, we'll introduce Report Builder,
look at designing report layouts,
and how you can dynamically set properties.
For this video, let's start with Report Builder itself.
You've already been introduced in module one
that it's the desktop tool,
and the only tool that you can use to develop
a paginated report.
In fact, there's three things that Report Builder does;
it allows you to develop your report,
to run it and preview the result,
and then to publish it when you're ready
to the Power BI service.
Report Builder is available as a download from Microsoft,
and there are few pre-requisites.
You simply need Windows 7 or later,
and Microsoft.NET framework 4.5.
Now, we'll make the note that Report Builder
isn't the end-user experience.
It is a tool designed intentionally for authoring.
The intention will be that you publish your report
to the service and thereupon, the consumption
takes place either in a web browser or mobile app,
or through some embedded scenario.
Now, one of the first things you're likely to see
when you launch Report Builder is
the Getting Started window.
The Getting Started window helps you get started
quickly and is great for beginners as well.
You can use it to create a new report,
either a blank report or you can leverage three
different wizards to quickly get started.
You can open an existing report from your file system,
or from a list of recently opened reports,
and this will open automatically.
If you don't like it, there is a check-box
in the bottom left corner, that allows you to disable it.
BEAR: I love the wizards.
PETER: You love the wizards?
BEAR: I do, it's a great way to get started.
For a lot of people,
that use desktop per se, they can, anybody can use a wizard.
Stay tuned, because I think we might have a demonstration
coming up shortly that might keep you happy, Report Bear.
BEAR: Thankfully.
Alright, well let's then begin the topic of layout.
So, what you are going to see in Report Builder is
the report canvas, for designing a single report at a time.
Optionally, you can add a ruler,
that's gonna help you guide and layout,
in a certain way, with accuracy,
although we're gonna show you this great alignment tool
that's already built in.
I often find that I don't use that ruler,
I rely on the snap-to-grid type layout.
Design functionality is available from quick access commands
and I'll point them out to you in a moment,
there's a ribbon with a host of commands,
and then various panes that'll be very useful
as you're configuring different types of report items.
Let's take a look then, here it is, Report Builder.
What you'll find in the middle is the report canvas.
At the very top you'll find the quick access commands,
that allows you to save, and we really do recommend you
save your progress as often as you can remember.
CHRIS: Yes.
PETER: Control + S is my friend, actually.
As I keep developing.
And when you do make those mistakes,
you'll find the quick access commands
also provide Undo and Redo.
Okay, classic shortcuts of Control + Z and Control + Y
work there as well.
Top right corner, you'll see at a glance the currently
authenticated user, and if there's a need,
you can either sign in, or switch account.
This will become relevant when you're publishing your report
to the Power BI service.
The ribbon, anybody familiar with Office products
will be familiar with the ribbon.
And the ribbon has these four tabs of File,
Home, Insert and View.
On the left, is the report data pane,
that's going to present to you
the resources that you have to build up your report layout.
And then across the top of the report canvas,
there's a parameters pane.
It's basically a grid, it's rows and columns,
and where you have parameters, typically used
to allow your report users to enter values,
like the sales order number
for their report, you've got a degree of control
over the placement horizontally
and vertically of those parameters.
CHRIS: Yes, and people really like to make sure they have
parameters in a particular order.
Well, I'm pretty particular about that.
There's a certain way, workflow,
in a way as to how that should happen.
In fact, in module four,
we look at parameters in more detail.
It will be imperative that you get them in the right order
for certain scenarios, like,
and stay tuned for the topic of, cascading parameters.
CHRIS: Yes.
Now, on the right hand side is the Properties pane,
in fact, it's turned off by default,
but I always turn it on, because when you select an item,
or in fact, multi-select items, in the report canvas,
it exposes to you the properties.
Either to read them, and understand what they are,
or where necessary, you can edit them.
Now, it can be overwhelming for a beginner, by the way,
we'll take a closer look at the Properties pane.
But what you'll find is that commonly configured properties
are often available in a more friendly way.
Now beneath the Grouping pane,
that we introduced to you in module five,
the data region known as a tablex,
and it's variance of table, matrix, and list.
The Grouping pane is where you'll configure
the groupings for your data.
And then lastly, in the bottom right corner,
don't overlook the fact that you've got a zoom control
for the report canvas, zoom in, zoom out.
If I'm doing very pixel-perfect work, I will often
zoom right in, and it gives me much better control over
placement and sizing and alignment.
There's also, to the left of the zoom control,
a very handy couple of buttons that allow you to toggle
between design and preview mode.
All right, let's take a closer look at the ribbons then.
There are four ribbon tabs; beginning with File,
we use this for New, Open, Save, and Save As.
Notice that when you Save As,
there's the ability to save back to your PC,
or, as we'll be covering later in the course,
in module seven, the ability to publish
to the Power BI service.
Let's be clear that when you're creating and developing
a report, you're actually developing an .rdl file.
CHRIS: What does .rdl stand for?
PETER: It's an acronym for--
CHRIS: Report Definition Language.
PETER: Yes, indeed it is!
This is the XML language that defines
the entire report itself.
So, when you save this locally,
it'll just be an .rdl document,
and when you publish it to the service it will
become a paginated report in the workspace.
Now, there's the ability also to open the Options
from that File ribbon tab.
The options are useful for accessing resources like
links to community forums, feedback, the Power BI team blog,
catch up on the latest, greatest news
from the engineering group,
there's also the ability to check for updates.
And this is a product that is likely to be
updated over time, Chris?
CHRIS: Yeah, we won't be updating it as often as
the desktop tool does, but you'll be seeing
a fair amount of updates
for Report Builder throughout each year.
PETER: All right, I think by default
you'll be automatically notified if an update
has become available and then you can download it.
You could use the options to turn that off,
if you didn't want to ever know
about a better release becoming available.
CHRIS: Well, for certain enterprise organizations
they like to control exactly what version
of Report Builder is used, so they often turn that off.
PETER: Right.
Next, let's take a look at the Home ribbon.
The first command here is the Run command,
all right, so you can switch between design and preview.
I've already pointed out that the other way
to do that is at the bottom right,
just to the left of the zoom,
you can access it there as well.
The rest of the capabilities are all about formatting.
Whether it's Copy, Paste, formatting fonts, paragraphs,
borders, numbers, and alignment.
The Insert ribbon tab, then presents to you all of the tools
that you have to add objects to your report design layout.
They consist of data regions,
data visualizations and report items,
we're going to look at them in more detail in module five.
There's the ability to add subreports,
but you might notice that it's ghosted on the ribbon.
Yes, it's ghosted on the ribbon for now, simply
because we have not added the subreports capability
to the service yet.
However, by the time you view this video,
or shortly thereafter, it may be there at that point,
because we're actively working on it.
And that's a good reason to leave the notifications on.
When there are new versions available.
Very true. Within time,
subreports will become an option for you.
CHRIS: Yes.
Now, in your report layout there's the ability
also to turn on or off headers and footers.
And we'll talk about report layout shortly.
Lastly, on the View ribbon tab, this is where you can turn
on or off that ruler to help you place your items on
the report canvas, and then there are the four panes that
you can choose to turn on or off according to the real
estate space that you need.
Often these days, Chris, the size of monitors,
I leave them on at all times. Yes.
If you're constrained for space,
you might toggle them on or off.
Yeah, I do the same thing as well,
I often have all of them on,
just because I have such a wide monitor
that there's no reason to keep them off.
That's the luxury of a wide monitor.
Yes.
All right, so a quick look, then, at those panes.
Let's focus on two of them, the Report Data
and the Properties.
The report data that you'll find docked
to the left of Report Builder is there to help
you manage and explore your resources to assist
in designing your report layout.
So, what you'll find available to you are built-in fields.
Fields such as, what's the report name, execution time--
CHRIS: Page numbering.
PETER: Yes, page numbering, and also,
who is the user that is opening this report?
CHRIS: Yes, that's actually a very important field,
which I'm sure we'll touch on throughout this course.
Absolutely, when we talk about data permissions,
we'll use the built in field, with the user ID,
to perhaps filter the data according
to what they're allowed to see.
Report parameters are defined here as well.
We can create them, we can edit them.
Images that you'll embed into the report
are available here as well.
Your data sources and datasets that we're gonna cover
in the next module are here as well.
You can see in the image that there's a data source
for the AdventureWorksDW2016,
there's a single dataset named SalesOrder,
and when it's expanded it presents to us the fields.
These fields are what we use to layout our report designs.
The properties pane that we've already introduced,
presents to you the properties of any selected
or multi-selected items on the canvas.
Do note that it can be overwhelming for a beginner.
There could be lots of properties,
so you've got some options here.
You could decide to keep them grouped by type,
and if you look at the image on the slide,
you'll see that there are groupings like Code,
Data Only, and General.
If you know the name of the property,
you might opt to sort them alphabetically.
And that way it might be easier for you to locate them.
Just a tip there.
When you've got an object on the report,
you might choose to right click it as well,
and that might mean that you've got
a property page that opens.
A window opens, and it provides usually a better experience
for configuring commonly accessed properties.
So don't feel you always need to come
to the properties pane to do things.
Sometimes you need to, but often there are
a better way with the property pages.
So a closer look at this, what you'll see at the top left
of the Properties pane, is the item that you've got selected
here it happens to be the Report itself.
You've got that ability to toggle whether we're gonna look
at them grouped or alphabetical.
Here's an example of a property name,
and the corresponding value.
And then you can expand those property groups
to reveal sub-properties.
And then for the report itself, this object has
its own property page.
And so one way to open the property page is you can
just click here in the Properties window.
As a tip, when you go to edit a property,
the way that I do it, is I click the name
of the property and that therefore,
selects the value and then I just commence typing,
or selecting from the dropdown list.
All right, discussion now about Report Preview.
You'll do this a lot when you're developing your reports.
You begin with a canvas, start laying out the design,
and then you'll go, well, what does it really look like?
And so, you'll find yourself toggling the Preview mode,
and then you'll go, okay, that looks great,
but there's room for improvement,
toggle back to Design mode,
whereupon you make some adjustments,
and then you switch back to Preview.
So, no question about it,
I will be doing this hundreds of times,
and it becomes an automatic reflex, in fact.
Design, Preview, Design, Preview.
Yeah, one of the things that I really like here,
is the Print Layout view, where you can actually see
what it'll look like in the printed page,
and you can actually interact with the report,
seeing it in the final format.
So if you're trying to create a document
that's in letter format, that's a portrait document,
you can just switch on that mode,
and it'll give you a great way to go interact
with the report and see exactly
what the exported format will look like.
A lot of report authors, when they're first getting
started with the tool, oftentimes, run into issues
where they have blank pages or things like that,
they don't really know how it's gonna be laid out,
that's a great tool to highlight here in terms of one
of the advantages of Report Builder.
Well let's make sure in the following demo--
Yes. That we point that out.
CHRIS: Absolutely.
So what we see in this mode,
you've got the Properties pane here.
We see the single property of the sales order number,
and then we've got the ability to view the report.
Now, what you'll find is,
and we'll talk about this in module four
with the parameters.
The parameters require entry,
and there's no default for them,
then the user won't see the report yet.
They'll have to fill in the parameter values,
and then click View Report.
And then of course, if you were gonna switch
to a different sales order number,
we'll just modify the number in the parameter box,
and then click the View Report again.
All right, in Preview, there is a different ribbon.
It's got its File ribbon tab, and the Run ribbon tab.
So, on the Run ribbon tab,
you can toggle back to Design mode,
or you can start to zoom, page navigate,
refresh, stop the refresh if it's taking too long,
there are print commands, and Chris has talked
about the print layout there.
The ability to export to a different format.
You can collapse the parameters pane,
you can also do a text search across your report.
So, here's an example of what would happen
when we click on the Export command,
revealing to us these eight supported rendering formats.
CHRIS: The export will look and act just like it does
in the Power BI service.
And I know Paginator Report Bear likes this topic.
Wizards! Ooh!
So what about the wizards?
Would you like to talk about the wizards?
'Cause I know it's your favorite topic.
BEAR: So, oftentimes, people are like
who uses the wizards?
Actually, a lot people do.
Because they want to get started very quickly,
creating a table, a chart, or even a map.
And you can go right to it from the initial
Getting Started screen, or, if you o and want to add
any of those visuals from the ribbon,
you can choose to do it via wizard,
and it walks you through each of the steps.
Great, so there are three wizards.
That's right.
You need to create a table or a matrix?
You wanna create a chart or if you wanna create a map.
So, correct, two ways, Getting Started,
launch straight into a wizard, Insert ribbon tab,
launch the wizard from there.
All right, let's wrap up, then,
with a development methodology.
Now, there's no exact recipe or science
about how you can develop your paginated reporting,
but it typically follows these steps.
You're gonna create the report, and by the way,
you can have multiple instances of Report Builder open.
CHRIS: That's true.
It's dedicated to one .rdl document at a time.
So let's just say we open up Report Builder,
we've got the Getting Started screen.
You choose your options,
it could be wizard, or blank report.
If you're gonna go to the blank report route,
you're gonna consider, where's my data coming from?
You'll create a data source,
and then you'll define one or more datasets,
that are commands to retrieve data from the data source.
If there's parameterization requirements,
you'll define these.
And then you get to lay out the report on the canvas.
On your Insert ribbon tab,
you've got all of those data regions,
visualizations, and report items.
You're constantly going to be testing and previewing,
and once you're satisfied that it's ready for consumption,
you're then going to Save As, to a Power BI service
workspace on dedicated capacity,
whereupon the report is published, and you may then need
to consider some post-publication tasks that we'll talk
about in this course in module seven.
All right, well that brings the introduction
to Report Builder to an end.
I'm really excited to see what's coming next.
Yes!