Last 3 SSRS tutorials were kinda boring of preparation phase, maybe a calm before a storm :). After creating SSRS project, defining data source and dataset, it is finally time to create a simple report in SSRS. Reporting services offers plenty of useful tools you can use to create nice and practical tables/graphs. We will not do anything complicated as this miniseries is focused mainly on beginners and semi-advanced.

Our Dataset from previous part (Part 3 – How to configure Dataset in SSRS) contains sales data organized by product and product group in individual year/month. We will create simple table which will only display the result of the dataset.

Let me just recap that after our previous work, our project should look like this.

How to Create Report from SQL Table in SSRS

We finally reach core of the thing and it is time to work on data visualization. It is good to think through how will the structure of the report look like so the user will be able to navigate in it. We could start by adding a table. Visualization tools can be found in “Toolbox“. Select tool Table and use mouse to drag it into the report area [2].

Right now, the table is not bound to any data. We have to “tell” the table which data is relevant to it. It will logically be the data from our dataset. Press the right button on the left upper corner of the table and then select Tablix properties [3]. Link the dataset to “Dataset name” in the properties [4].

Table is now connected to the data. Only thing we need to finish is linking columns to cells in table (see below). You can do that by clicking into the cell of the table – list of the dataset columns will appear [5]. We will then gradually fill up the table with our data column by column. You can play with the formatting in a similar manner as in the Excel. Every cell has its own properties. We should get to the same result as the one on the screen [6].

You can see the result of our work using Preview button.

In the next part (Part 5 – configuring parameter in SSRS), we will take a look at how to configure report parameters/filters to not showing up all rows in the table every time we run a report. Instead, it should react to selected filter values.