CRM Report Wizard – The Foundation for Custom Reports

Roshan Mehta, 29 November 2012

The CRM 2011 Report Wizard is a nice way for general users to build personal reports which they can then share with other users. Users are restricted to the default report layout which consists of a light-blue colour scheme and simple formatting which cannot be changed from the CRM interface. In this blog, we will take a look at how we can use the CRM Report Wizard to build a simple report which we can then modify using Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS).

Let’s assume we need a report to display new Leads for the current month by city which will show the first name, last name, company, and website. To do this in CRM, navigate to Workplace and then click on Reports. On the ribbon select New, and then click on Report Wizard.

Click through the report wizard. We want to start from a new report, enter a meaningful name, and select Lead as the primary record type. Apply the following filter criteria:

The Report Wizard allows us to group the data by a specific field on the Lead entity and also lets us display data in a table format. I have applied the following layout to the report:

Complete the wizard and then run the report.

The report shows the information we need but it’s not very aesthetically pleasing. There is a lot of wasted space to the left, the column widths need adjusting, and I want to change the font styles and colour scheme to match the colour scheme of my company. What we can do now is download the report and make formatting changes inside BIDS.

Open up BIDS and create a new Report Server Project. In the Solution Explorer, right-click on Reports and then click on Add Existing Item.  You should now be able to open up the report and make formatting changes as you wish.

After you change the formatting you need to build the report to save the changes.

Back in CRM, select the New Leads This Month report and click on Edit. This time we need to select Existing File and browse to the RDL.