The Report Builder course is designed for users who wish to advance their skills in using SQL Server as a reporting resource. Report Builder is typically used as both an ad-hoc reporting mechanism, and to create permanent reports to be hosted on Reporting Services.

This is a three day course covering the following areas:

Using Analysis Services (SSAS) to prepare data

Creating OLAP Cubes
Creating and referencing dimensions
Defining Relationships

Creating Reports

Creating New Reports
Creating a Basic Table, Chart and Gauge

Exporting Reports into Excel, Word and PDFs

Formatting and Expressions

Formatting Items
Conditional Formatting
Inserting Images
Introduction to Expressions
Advanced Formatting / Styling

Groups and Sorting

Creating Groups
Calculating Totals and Percentages

Sorting data in Objects

Parameters

Creating Report Parameters
Creating Drop-Down Parameters
Multi-Valued Parameters

Joining Reports

Drillthrough
Subreports
Drilldown

Introduction to Reporting Services (SSRS)

Uploading Reports
Shared Data Sources
Caching and Snapshots
Linked Reports

 

The basis of the course will be classroom taught sessions followed by practical supervised workshops.

Report Builder vs Reporting Services
Report Builder is a client-side executable and therefore does not run in the web browser as Reporting Services does. Users can design reports in an ad-hoc manner without saving them to the server. Reporting Services maximises the effectiveness of Report Builder, and allows for reports to be joined together, along with greater control over how and when the reports are run.