Once data has been selected, you can begin designing your report. You do this by creating a layout. A layout is a combination of objects that describe how the document should look.

This is the Report Designer. As you can see, it looks like many of the other Windows applications you're used to working with. The big difference is that the Report Designer does not contain a document; it contains a layout. The layout can be used to generate many different documents, all based on the data you've selected. The white rectangular areas with the horizontal bars below are called bands. This report has a Header, Detail, and Footer band. When ReportBuilder generates a document from this layout, the objects in the Header band will appear at the top of each page. The objects in the Footer band will appear at 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 row of your data selection.

This is how a document is created from the layout. You can generate a different document from the same layout by simply changing your data selection.