Before designing a report with the Report Designer, it is important to understand how the Report Designer applies dimensions so that reports can be created efficiently.

Essentially, Report Designer asserts more control over the workbook than traditional Excel add-ins that only apply business rules on the cell level.

Report Designer allows you to insert business rules at four levels:

• Report level: Applies to the entire report
• Row level: Applies to all cells on the applicable row
• Column level: Applies to all cells in the applicable column
• Cell level: Applies only to the applicable cell

A typical example would be a financial statement with the following location for business rules:

– Department/company parameters (filters): Report level

– Account selections: Row level

– Period selections (Current Period, Year-to-Date, etc.): Column level

– Sum and variance formulas: Cell level

You can see business rules in the Layout Editor window by clicking on the boxes displayed for the sheet level and the row or column level as shown in the figure.

To see the cell level business rule, click in the particular cell in the Excel worksheet.