Jack Wiebe

Modified on: Tue, 18 Sep, 2018 at 11:42 AM

Creating Stylized Reports

Reports can be stylized to change how they look when printed by changing the color, font, and size of different items. These changes can be purely cosmetic, or can aid in visualizing complex reports.

Table of Contents

Example of a stylized report
Stylized Columns

Example of a stylized report

The outcome of this guide will show how to customize the font of different headings and columns, change the Colors, and add additional borders to columns to aid in grouping the data in the report.

Figure 1. Customized report styles, printed on A5 paper.

Stylized Columns

Colors can be customized for many parts of the report—column text, headings, and borders can all be colored using the properties per column. Other items like the report heading and report date/time and page numbers can be customized as well, from the Page Layout tab of the report.

Change settings for multiple columns

When more than one column is selected any changes to the column properties will change for all selected columns.

Column colors

Columns have several parts which can be colored individually—Body Color, Border Color, Header Border Color, and Header Colour can all be customized from the column properties.

To change a color:

From the Advanced Column Settings select the Body Color, Border Color, Header Border Color, or Header Colour property.
Press the button to open the color picker.

Custom Colours:

Instead of selecting from the colour picker, you can enter the colour value directly into the property field using various formats:

Color name	orange
Hexadecimal value	#FFA500
RGB values	255, 166, 0

Column color properties

1	Body Color is the color of the column text below the header.
2	Border Color is the color of the column border below the header.
3	Header Border Color is the color of the column border around the header.
4	Header Color is the color of the header text.

Example of a column with stylized colors applied.

Borders

Borders can be:

used to separate the data between columns and add visual grouping between columns with similar types of data.
enabled for each side individually or combined.

To add a border to a column:

From the Advanced Column Settings select the Border or Header Border options that you want applied to the column.

1	Border is used for the border below the heading.
2	Header Border is used for the border around the heading.

Margins

Margins can be added to the columns to add a space between the borders and the text of the column.

From the Advanced Column Settings enter a Left Column Margin or Right Column Margin to add space to either side of the column.

Example of three columns with left and right margins applied.

Fonts

Fonts can be used to change the look and size of the heading or body text of the columns.

To change the font:

From the Advanced Column Settings open the font dialog for the Body Font or Header Font by pressing the button.
Select the Font, Font Style, Size, and Effects for the font.
Press OK to save the new font settings.

1	Different Fonts which are installed on the system can be selected here.
2	Available font styles can be selected here (italic or bold are common font styles, but what styles are available will vary based on which font is selected.
3	The size of the font can be changed here.
4	Different effects can be applied to the font here.
5	A preview of a sample of text is displayed here for the currently selected settings.