Standalone Report Designer overview
The Bold Reports® Standalone Report Designer is a Windows desktop tool for designing paginated SSRS, RDL, and RDLC reports. Developers and analysts use it to design, edit, preview, and export reports locally on their own machine.
What can you do with the Standalone Report Designer?
With the Bold Reports® Standalone Report Designer, you can design RDL and RDLC reports, connect to data through 27 data connectors (26 of them connect to data), preview reports in the built-in Report Viewer, and export them to seven formats.
Separate application launchers: Individual application launchers are provided for RDL and RDLC reports to design and view the respective report types.
Design and edit reports: You can create a report using data regions, data visualization items, and basic report items with reporting features such as parameters, expressions, sorting, grouping, filtering, and more.
Business-user friendly: Business users can drag and drop report items in the Standalone Report Designer to create reports without writing code.
Wide variety of data providers: The Standalone Report Designer lists 27 data connectors (26 of them connect to data), including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, OLE DB, ODBC, Web API, JSON, XML, Snowflake, and Google BigQuery. See Data connectors for the full list.
Display reports: Newly created or existing reports can be previewed using the built-in Report Viewer.
Export reports: You can export the RDL and RDLC report to PDF, Excel, CSV, PowerPoint, Word, HTML, and XML.
Interactive reports: In preview, end users can filter, highlight, and sort report data to change how the report is displayed.
Easy setup: You install the Standalone Report Designer with a setup wizard and can start designing reports without extra configuration.
Frequently asked questions
Which operating systems does the Standalone Report Designer run on?
The Standalone Report Designer runs on Windows 10 and later, and on Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019. See System requirements.
What is the difference between RDL and RDLC reports?
An RDL report stores its data source and query and can be published to a server. An RDLC report has no built-in data connection, so your application passes the data to it.
Which formats can I export a report to?
The Standalone Report Designer exports RDL and RDLC reports to PDF, Excel, CSV, PowerPoint, Word, HTML, and XML.
Can I publish reports from the Standalone Report Designer to a server?
Yes. You can publish RDL reports to SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) or Bold Reports® Report Server. RDLC reports are not meant for server-side publishing.
Can I install the Standalone Report Designer without an internet connection?
Yes. Unlock the setup with a .lic unlock key file from your Bold Reports® account. See Download and installation.