You use the Report Designer to create new reports, and to modify existing reports. To activate the Report Designer, choose Report Designer from the Report menu.

Reports are made up of bands. The way data appears in a report is determined by the kind of band a report object (data field, image, line, shape, etc.) is in. For example, objects in the Page Header band will appear at the top of each page. Objects in the Page Footer band will appear at the bottom of each page. And the objects in the Detail band will repeat down the page until no more page space is available, at which point a new page will be started (the Detail band prints once for each record in the table the report is based on).

The Report Designer makes extensive use of popup menus. To display a popup menu, right-click a band or report object. You can also specify the text formatting (font, font size, color, and text alignment) from the Format toolbar. The text formatting affects all selected objects.