Ever since I started to blog, I have been thinking that I should write something about Reporting Services. My thoughts with this blog is to write about stuff I do at work and lately I've been working with Reporting Services, but I haven't been able to think anything out worth writing about. The last couple of days I've been thinking about why I can't and figured that it's probably because I find it really easy to work with RS. Maybe that's what I should write? RS isn't that hard. It's just plain simple, at least compared to other reporting designers that I've been using, like Crystal Reports (I always hated Crystal, so I haven't been doing almost anything in Crystal, really, and that of course might be part of the problem for me with Crystal). I probably should tell you that I have only been using RS to make my reports, which I then integrated into my own web UI, so I haven't been using the portal, subscription and other parts of RS.

 

One thing that might not be obvious when you start using RS is that you can use Visual Basic .NET in your reports. Since you can use VB .NET, you can use the whole .NET Framework :)

For example, I wanted to display a month name (short version and localized) in a heading in one of my columns and all I got was the date (as a DateTime). Simple enough, in the heading cell, just set this as the expression:

=System.Globalization.DateTimeFormatInfo.CurrentInfo.GetAbbreviatedMonthName(Parameters!ToDate.Value.Month)

This ability adds some power to RS.

 

One last thing; the export to Excel functionality is just great! It even preserves my groupings. Try it!