# Designing a Report

Setting the Report Destination |

The default destination for a report is the printer. To set an alternate default destination, select the Output Destination option on the Report Designer File menu.

A list of alternate destinations is displayed:

Clipboard | Sends tab-delimited output to the Windows Clipboard. Cell formatting (font, color, alignment, borders) is stripped. Output is considered as one page (with one page header and footer).
Custom Output | Sends output to a user-created output object. See Custom Output Object Interface.
HTML document | Output is an HTML file in tabular format. A style for each cell with data is created to make it easy for an HTML programmer to further customize the output. The generated HTML code is compliant with W3C standards for HTML 4.01 Transitional.
PDF document | Sends the output to a PDF file.
Printer | Sends the output to the printer. Optionally, if the Use Internal PDF Driver option is set in the System menu (or the PxPlus INI file has an AutoEnablePDF=1 entry in the [Config] section), you can specify a file name with the .pdf extension to output directly into a PDF file.
Tab delimited file | Output to a tab-delimited file, one field per cell, no tabs allowed in the data. Cell formatting (font, color, alignment, borders) is stripped.
Viewer | Output to the PxPlus Viewer to preview the report. From the Viewer, the report can be sent to a printer or to a PDF file.

If a Destination Path Expression has been specified for the report, the appropriate file extension will be added to the output file name at run time if the extension has been omitted (.pdf for PDF documents, .htm for HTML files, and .txt for tab-delimited files). If an extension is included in the expression that does not match the output destination specified for the report, the output destination will be changed to match the extension when the report is run. This behavior occurs when the report is run through the Report Designer or when using a RunReport method or called program.

(Support for Destination Path Expressions was added in PxPlus 2022.)

The Output Destination can be overridden at run time. For additional ways to override the Output Destination at run time, see Generating a Report.

To output a report to the specified output destination from within the Report Designer, select Generate Report from the Report Designer File menu.