# Designing reports

Report Designs determine how to process the data and how the results are displayed.

They can also determine which template is used for PDF exports and which charts appear on them. Ready-made Report Designs serve as a useful guide for constructing your own Report Designs. You can also create custom Report Designs.

Figure: Report Design

1
  Report overview
2
  Heading Section
3
  Report Sections
4
  Properties of the selected element

There are several ways to create Report Designs. Although you can start by defining a new empty Report Design, it is often easier to use one of the predefined Report Designs as a template. The comments in the properties of predefined Report Designs and Sections explain their general purpose.

The Report Design properties specify, for example, the time period for the report. You can define a period comparison for the Report Design. This feature allows you to compare values between two identical time periods. For example, if the time period is one week, you can compare the results for this week to the results from the previous week.