Rave Reports Visual Designer

Introduction

Reporting can be one of the most complex, yet most important tasks for anyone dealing with a database. Reports are the primary visual means to express information retrieved from a body of data. To solve the problems associated with presenting a visual report of data in a meaningful and informative manner, traditional visual reporting tools have offered banded layout tools geared towards table-style listings of data. Today, however, much more complex reporting requirements exist and are not easily handled by banded layout tools.

Welcome to the next level in visual reporting! The Rave visual designer offers many unique features that help to make the reporting process simpler, quicker and more efficient. Rave is an intuitive page based visual design environment that can easily handle a wide variety of report formats, much more than a purely banded style tool. Rave also includes mirroring and other technologies to encourage you to reuse the contents of your reports for quicker changes and easier maintenance. In general though, Rave has been designed to offer the most flexibility and functionality in an easy to learn format.

Where do you begin? Since Rave is page-based designer, many of its features should be easy to use with only a little practice. There are a lot of options and some might not be obvious when just starting. Remember that many of these options can be ignored in the beginning, but as your needs and knowledge increases these options are readily available. In fact, Wizards generate "standard" reports without having to know behind-the-scene details. However, we do recommend that you take some time and do a quick read of this manual.

Included with Rave is a project called "RaveDemo" that contains several report samples. To see common designs, start the RaveDemo.exe and open the project to access the different report types. Exploring the RaveDemo project and other samples are excellent ways to learn Rave.