| At its core, the process of designing reports hasn’t changed substantially in the past 15 years.
The report designer lays out report objects, which contain data from a known data source, in
a design application such as Crystal Reports or Microsoft Access. He or she then tests report
execution, verifies the accuracy of the results, and distributes the report to the target audience.
Sure, there are enough differences between design applications to mean that the designer
must become familiar with each particular environment. However, there’s enough crossover
functionality to make this learning curve small. For example, the SUM function is the same in
Crystal Reports as it is in Microsoft Access as it is in Structured Query Language (SQL).
With Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (referred to as SSRS throughout the book),
there is, again, only a marginal difference in the way reports are designed from one graphical
report design application to another. So, if you do have previous reporting experience, your
learning curve for SSRS should be relatively shallow. This is especially true if you come from a
.NET environment, because the report designer application for SSRS is Visual Studio 2005 or
the application included with SQL Server 2005, Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS). |
