When creating a report, a good layout is essential to ensure that the information in the report is presented in a clear and effective manner. A well-designed report starts by aligning report items. Sizing, positioning, and distributing report items will help to create a report with an attractive appearance.
In this blog, we are going to explain how to use aligning options to design a professional report. The Bold Reports Designer provides these options in the designer toolbar, as shown in the following image.
These aligning options are categorized as aligning, sizing, and distributing. Let’s start to use these aligning options in Reports Designer.
Align
Alignment is a key principle in report design, because alignment gives a report design a neat and polished look. The dynamic nature of some report items will result in them being difficult to align. To fix this, you can use align options to position such report items on a design surface. Select a minimum of two report items to enable this option. You can align report items to the left, center, right, top, bottom, or middle positions.
Left align
When you select a group of report items and left align them, they’ll align with the item among them that is farthest to the left.
Center align
The selected report items are centered between the left-most item and right-most item among them.
Right align
When you select a group of report items and right align them, they’ll align with the item among them that is farthest to the right.
Top align
This aligns the selected items with the item among them that is closest to the top.
Middle align
This aligns the selected report items to the middle position between the top-most and bottom-most items among them.
Bottom align
This aligns the selected report items with the item among them that is closest to the bottom.
Center horizontally
This aligns the selected report items to the center position of the design surface or parent container horizontally.
Center vertically
This aligns the selected report items to the center position of the design surface or parent container vertically.
Align to grid
This snaps the top left of the selected report items to the closest grid line in the design surface.
Size to grid
This snaps the selected report item to the closest grid line by resizing the report item on all four sides.
Sizing
You can use sizing to provide equal sizing for the selected report items in a design area.
Same size
Resizes the width and height of the selected report items to the size of the first selected report item.
Same height
Resizes the height of the selected report items to the height of the first selected report item.
Same width
Resizes the width of the selected report items to the width of the first selected report item.
Distribute
When you find yourself wasting too much time making minor adjustments, it’s very useful to have an option like distribute, which allows you to place the report items with equal spacing in both horizontal and vertical directions.
Horizontally
The horizontal option distributes the report items in the design surface with equal intervals horizontally.
Vertically
The vertical option distributes the report items in the design surface with equal intervals vertically.
Conclusion
In this blog, we have learned about the alignment options available in Report Designer. You can use these features to improve your report quality and develop reports in a professional manner. We hope you found this blog useful.
If you have any questions, please post them in the comments section. You can also contact us by submitting them through our contact page, or if you have an account, you can log in to submit your support questions. Feel free to check out the Bold Reports Embedded demos and our documentation to explore tools and their various report-customization features.
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