A report author prepares a complete report - designs the layout of report, defines data sources and datasets, uses the data regions and controls to represent data. ActiveReports provides report authors with a compiled tool  – a standalone designer application. The predefined templates and simple drag-drop operations in the designer make report designing easy and quick, without using any code.

Developers may be a report authors, who can in addition use the Visual Studio Integrated Designer to prepare applications based on the Win or Web samples - for example, see the FlatEndUserDesigner sample.

The Report Authors section assumes that you are using the standalone designer application as a primary way to create your report.