Since the Report Designer is where we will spend the majority of our time working with the various building block definitions that will form our reports, it is worth our while to become more familiar with the general layout of the Report Designer. Fortunately, the latest version of Management Reporter includes a layout that is similar in both style and feel to other Microsoft products, including Dynamics GP. This makes the process of navigating the Report Designer and other Management Reporter components much more intuitive.

For example, after launching the Report Designer, a Management Reporter 2012 splash screen appears and calls to mind the splash screen that accompanies the launch of GP 2013.

If we are opening Management Reporter for the first time, a Welcome screen appears as we can see from the following screenshot; we can quickly launch other areas of the application to immediately begin working on new building blocks, creating...