Animations for the Preview

Quite a while ago we introduced a full screen presentation mode which allows you a quick presentation of your reports. Why fire up PowerPoint (or any other presentation software) when you just need to present a couple of charts and tables? This way, your presentations are lightweight and always up to date, as you or your end-users can re-create them just in time.

Sorting Charts by Value

This is one of those "whaaaaat, that didn't work before?" features. No, it didn't. Until version 22, you were only able to sort bar charts with string labels ascending or descending. Alphabetically. Numerics and dates are treated differently, but for strings you only could get A-Z, Z-A or unordered, i.e. in the order the database supplies the data.

Introducing Radar Charts as New Chart Type

radar chart in list & label 22

We'll introduce a brand new popular chart type that has been missing in List & Label until version 22: radar charts. Also known as "spider charts", "web charts" or "polar charts", they are a cool way to visualize ratios between different categories across multiple rows. It can answer questions like "which values are most similar, i.e. do we see clusters of values" and helps to find outliers at a glance.

Lightning-fast Ad-hoc Design with Report Server 3

With combit Report Server 3, you now also have the ad-hoc Designer in addition to the design features from previous versions. Ad-hoc Design wizards enable you to create lists and diagrams (charts) quickly and easily. This combination equips the reliable and powerful Report Server with a quick and streamlined interface that is perfect for generating simple reports. The interface of the new wizards has also been optimized for devices that support touch-screen technology, which allows it to be easily operated on tablet devices as well.

Supporting to Paste Formattings Between Objects

From the perspective of an Office User, this was one of the major missing features in List & Label so far. In Microsoft Excel, for example, you often find yourself styling cells to resemble a headline. The workflow here is to just style one cell and then use the format painter tool for the other cells. This saves a remarkable amount of time. In List & Label, you could have used a multi selection of fields, however if you forgot (or – behold – didn't know) this feature, you'd find yourself repeating the same formatting steps again and again. And if you wanted to transfer the format of a whole object – e.g. a chart with all the fonts, colors, background settings etc. – there was no workaround to a huge lot of work. Enter the format painter tool…

Supporting Multiple Report Containers

Since we introduced the report container in List & Label 11, the one remaining feature request that kept coming in was “could we have multiple report containers, please”. Many cases can be covered by using a multi-columnar layout for the report container as a workaround or combining distances between container elements and changes in alignment to get the visual impression of separated tables. But these workarounds are not very discoverable and they are just that – workarounds.
In version 20 we’ll introduce a brand new databinding mode for the .NET component which will replace the old one seamlessly. You won’t need to apply any code changes to profit from this new mode. However, under the hood things will be working quite different then.