At its core, the process of designing reports hasn’t changed substantially in the past 20 years. The report designer lays out report objects, which contain data from a known source of data, in a design application such as Reporting Services, Business Objects Reports, or Microsoft Access. He or she then tests report execution, verifies the accuracy of the results, and distributes the report to the target audience. Sure, there are enough differences between design applications to mean that the designer must become familiar with each particular environment. However, there’s enough crossover functionality to make this learning curve small. For example, the SUM function is the same.
