The Report Designer offers a design surface which is fully integrated into the Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET 2005 environment. You can add a report to a project, or simply open a report designer from the Visual Studio File menu under New > File and save it to be opened in the Report Preview application.

Once you have opened a report, you will see that the designer is comprised of three tabs. The first tab is the visual designer, the second allows you to add code to the report, and the third is the preview window.

The Data smart panel allows you to connect your report to data from practically any source. You can share a data source across a project with a number of reports, or you can set up one or more new data sources for each report. On the Data smart panel, you select the fields for your report by creating datasets with the query builder or by typing in your SQL query (or use XPath expressions for XML data sources).

The Data Explorer shows you a tree view of all of your report's data sources and datasets.

The Layout tab includes a toolbox filled with data regions and report items which you can use on the design surface, which by default consists of only a Body section. The data regions are used to contain report items with data which is to repeat for each record. There is also a Data Explorer containing datasets with lists of fields which were created in the Data smart panel that you can drag onto the report.

The Code tab allows you to add custom code or unbound data sources to your report.

The Report menu offers access to report images, parameters and properties. You can also add a page header or footer in the Report menu.

The Preview tab allows you to check your work as you go without the need to run the project and provides printing and exporting functionality.

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