What's new in Reporting Services 2008

New/changed Reporting Services 2008 feature - BETTER CHARTS

Creating charts has been completely rewritten, and now works in a similar way to charting in Microsoft Office (for example, you can right-click on an individual part of a chart to format it). The following dialog box gives an idea of just how much better the new charting facility is:

New/changed Reporting Services 2008 feature - GAUGES

A tad gimmicky perhaps, but the new gauge feature (shown here in design view) is still a fun way to display data:

New/changed Reporting Services 2008 feature - NEW WAY OF GROUPING

Grouping has changed radically in SSRS 2008. An idea of the extent of the change is shown in the following diagram; those familiar with SSRS 2005 have a bit of catching up to do:

New/changed Reporting Services 2008 feature - BETTER DIALOG BOXES

Most SSRS dialog boxes have been redesigned to make them easier to use, and more like those used in other Microsoft applications. This example is for sorting in a table:

New/changed Reporting Services 2008 feature - BETTER TEXTBOX FORMATTING

You can now format part of a textbox, as shown below (you can also use paragraph styles such as alignment and hanging indents, and even import HTML into a textbox):

New/changed Reporting Services 2008 feature - SINGLE REPORT DATA TAB

The Data tab has been replaced by the Report Data pane, which shows you data sources, datasets, parameters, images, and built-in fields:

New/changed Reporting Services 2008 feature - REPORT BUILDER 2.0

Reporting Services 2008 contains Report Builder 2.0.  This allows you to create reports without the intermediate step of creating a report model, and includes an Office 2007 style ribbon.