Reports join different views of data in one place. You design reports in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 using the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Development Environment and Microsoft Reporting Services.

For Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013, we have created report design guidelines to help you take advantage of the power of Microsoft Reporting Services.

Design Concepts

The basis for the design guidelines is twofold: They should benefit the customer using a report and they should help the partner designing a report.

For customers to be effective using reports in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013, the design of the reports should be such that the reports are:

• Simple and clean — reports should not contain more information than necessary.
• Easy to skim and read — optimizing visualizations helps the user going through a report.
• Consistent — across all report types, reports can be categorized and each category can have the same principles.

To help partners in designing reports, we have based the principles of the report design guidelines for development on:

• Simplicity
• Create a minimum of rules.
• Use the default options that Visual Studio 2010 offers.
• Use a standard palette for colors (Bright Pastel).
• Create a checklist that can be used when designing a report.

All reports in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 can be classified as one of three types:

• Documents — formal outgoing reports, for example, sales invoice and order confirmation reports.
• Simple lists — internal reports that show data at one level with a unique key, row by row. Reports are mostly overviews of master data, for example, the Customer and Vendor List reports.
• Grouped lists — internal reports that show more complex data grouped per key. Reports are mostly combinations of master data and its connected data, for example, the Customer Detail Aging and Customer/Item Sales reports.

Examples

Document Reports: Sales Invoice

Simple list reports: Resource Usage

Grouped list reports: Customer – Detail Trial Bal.

Guidelines

The following shows the Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 report design guidelines, wrapped in a checklist. It is divided into three sections: canvas, header and body.

Example of a Document Report Design

For more information, see Report Design Guidelines on MSDN.

-Coen Overgaag