Creating a Designer report using Birst

This procedure goes through the steps of creating a basic report using Birst.

Note: The procedures and steps in this section use the new HTML 5 designer in Birst. Steps may differ if you are using the Classic designer in Birst. If you need more detailed information on authoring Designer reports in Birst, see the Birst Designer User Guide for your version of Birst. You can find this document on Documentation Central.

To create a Designer report in Birst:

From the Global Navigation Menu in Birst, select Designer.
Designer opens with a blank report. Create a new report by adding entities or choose an existing report by selecting the Report Icon and selecting Open.
Select the band you would like to add your entity to and click the +Add Entity icon.
Select from the list of entity types.
Each entity has its own behavior. For example, after selecting Add Column, you will select the column from a subject area.

Note: To make report creation easier, column labels have a user-friendly name rather than the actual database column name. The Custom Subject Area also contains a description.
The Search bar can be used to quickly add columns to your report.
After the entity has been added, you can make additional changes from the left menu panel.
A column's properties can be edited by selecting the Column Properties icon.

From the Column Properties menu, you can set data formatting, group aggregation, aggregation, data type, and time series types. Note: Selecting the expression type and pivot options have been moved out of column properties into their own sections.
To format items on the report, click the item and use the toolbar to make formatting changes to color, alignment, size, position, font family, font size, and style.
To Undo or Redo any action while creating your report, use the Undo and Redo icons located at the top toolbar.
You can select multiple entities by holding down Ctrl or Cmd key. The toolbar will display thesettings for the most recently selected entity.
After selecting multiple entities, use Alignment to align items. The way alignment work depends on the position of the selected elements.
To view the rendered report, click the Results button. To return to Layout mode, select Layout.
To Save a report, select the Report icon and then select either Save or Save As. Save As will create a new version of the report; Save will update the existing report.

Note: Only the Save As option is available for Designer reports that were created in Flash.