About report layouts
You can present information in a report in many ways, for example, in a tabular list, a nested list, a chart, a series of text blocks, or a series of subreports. More complex report layouts can use a variety of these different presentations in a single report. Laying out a report entails placing data on the page and organizing the information in a way that helps a user to read and understand the information in the report.
Because there are infinite ways to lay out a report, it helps to work from a paper design. If you try to design and create the report layout at the same time, you can lose track of the data that you want to place in the report, or you can finish laying out one part of the report before realizing that you can better present the data using another layout.
Before you begin to lay out a report, verify in Data Explorer that the data set or data sets return the data that you want to use in your report. In many cases, the layout of a report is driven by the data.