What you've learned so far about reports covers the mechanics of generating, handling, and outputting data. This section covers some basics of report design. Report design, once again, is equivalent to frame design. Since a good portion of interface design also deals with frame design, you've already learned many techniques that can help make your reports look polished. The format phrase and frame phrase options that you relied on for designing interfaces also help with report design. For example, the AT, COLON, TO, SKIP, and SPACE options of the format phrase help you position widgets on the screen. They also let you position data in a report.

All the reports you have seen so far relied heavily on default ABL formatting. You'll want to design your key reports as carefully as you design your interfaces. Good report design means that you'll need the DEFINE FRAME statement to design your report containers. In addition to all the useful format and frame phrase options you learned earlier, there are some new techniques that you will learn about in this section, including:

• Using base fields as placeholders for variable expressions
• Using page headers
• Using page footers