Formatting Cells in a Report

You can style the body of your report by specifying cell background colors, and setting cell margins. These options can help to make your report more legible by separating and spacing out the text, and by delineating different rows of data. On the Format tab, select General from the quick access menu to apply this formatting to the entire report. Select Columns and then make selections from the Select Elements and Column menus to apply cell formatting to the data values, column headers, or both areas of the selected column or columns.

You can change the background color that appears behind the entire report, only the column titles, or only the data values in one or more columns of a report. Click the color swatch next to Report, Title Row, or Data Row to change the background color for the associated area. If you change the color for Report, the background color of the entire report, including the column title area and data values, is changed. Alternatively, you can set the background color for just the column titles using just the Title Row color option, or for just the data values using the Data Row color option. If you select Columns from the quick access menu and then select a specific column from the Select Elements and Columns menus, the background color is only applied to a single column.

When setting the background color for the data values in the report, you can apply different colored bands to made it easier to differentiate different rows or sort groups. You can set alternating bands in a repeating pattern of up to 4 rows. To add bands, click the plus icon to the right of the Data Row option, then set a second color. To add another color to the band pattern, click the plus sign again. To remove a band color, click the minus sign. The following image shows a report with 4 Data Row colors set in a pattern of yellow, white, blue, and white.

By default, each band spans a single row of the report. As an alternative, you can set each band to span a sort group, visually distinguishing values for different sort fields. To change the scope of each band, open the Alternate On menu and select a sort field in your report. The following image shows a report with 4 Data Row colors set in a pattern of yellow, white, blue, and white, alternating on each value of the Sale Quarter field.

To better space out the values in your report, when using a paginated output format such as HTML, PDF, PowerPoint, or XLSX, you can change the cell margins. You can select preset small, medium, and large margin options, or click the ellipsis button to set custom cell margins. When setting custom margins, you can set different margin sizes for each side of the cells in your report. You can clear the check boxes for different sides of the cells to use default values for them. For example, if you clear the check box for the Top margin, the default margins are used for the top of each cell. Custom margin sizes are set inches. You can use the Cell Margins settings in the General options to set margins for the entire report, or set margins for each area of the report individually by selecting a different option from the quick access menu. When setting margins using the Columns-level options, it may be preferable to set them separately for the column titles and data values. Since each line of text in the column titles is treated as a separate cell, you may prefer to use smaller top and bottom margins for them than for the cells containing data values.

To undo all custom styling changes made in the General options or Columns options, click Reset styling. All options revert to their default values, which are dependent on the theme used in the report.