formatting report frustrations

[busterbbg]

I'm so frustrated with this product  >:(  , I'm ready to throw my pc out the window. It seems so difficult to do the simplest things.
--You can't just click on a field and drag it to the size you want.
--When you highlight a field, the font & size boxes are empty!! If it's the default value, then SHOW me what the default values are.
-- I can't use the alignment boxes for a field, it only seems to work on headings.
-- It seems all field formatting has to be done thru the properties box. This is very frustrating since you have to first find the correct property that you wish to modify.

Please let me know if I am incorrect and if there is an easier way to format fields.

[navissar]

I'm not quite sure what it is you are after. If you wanted to unload frustrations, it's understandable. It is a saddening truth that many are thrown into the deep end of report development without proper training. They end up working too hard getting very very frustrated and not doing as good a job as they would have liked to. My first and main advice to you would be to get proper training. Make the case to the powers that be that you cannot produce good results based on trial and error. This is true for any BI software. Now, to answer your points on by one:

--You can't just click on a field and drag it to the size you want.

Yes. To do that you'll need to have a WYSIWYG editor. Report Studio does a lot of things that wouldn't be possible in a WYSIWYG editor (Conditional blocks, for instance).

--When you highlight a field, the font & size boxes are empty!! If it's the default value, then SHOW me what the default values are.

Report Studio is essentially an HTML editor. HTML objects design is done with CSS. If an object (Not quite sure what you mean by "Field") has a class which defines certain designs, that data will belong to the class. System wide defaults are configurable, and so are classes, so defaults are dependent on a lot of things really.

-- I can't use the alignment boxes for a field, it only seems to work on headings.

Not every object has the option of every possible styling feature. This has to do with the way the object is rendered in HTML or some other logic. I'm still not sure what is it that you call a "Field".

-- It seems all field formatting has to be done thru the properties box. This is very frustrating since you have to first find the correct property that you wish to modify.

That's a question of training. Being frustrated at Report Studio because you don't know where to look for which property is like being frustrated with a friend's kitchen because you don't know where the plates are.
Having said that, a lot of the design can and should be achieved by defining organisation-wide CSS-classes and using them across the board. That'll both save time and enforce a company-wide standard.

[busterbbg]

Thank you Nimrod for the response. Believe it or not I have been to IBM's Report Studio training. And I have asked these very same questions at the training. The response is pretty much, " That's the way Report Studio works".  Hence my frustration.  I have asked these questions again on this web page because I've found that many times experience users find easier ways to do things that are not mentioned in training classes. It looks like your response is the same I received from class. I'll just have to live with it and hope future versions will make formatting reports a little less frustrating.  :'(

[navissar]

If you take one thing away from this conversation, make it that report formatting should only be frustrating once. One organisational live report template should rid you of formatting on a per report basis.