Formatting documents

When you add a new control to a document, its initial formatting is determined by the control default for that type of control. Each control type (text field, image, rectangle, and so on) has a control default, which contains a full set of formatting properties to specify the default format. For more information on control defaults, including how to apply them and how to change them, see Defining default formatting for control types: control defaults.

Of course, you can change the formatting of each new control as desired. You can determine a document's appearance by formatting either its controls (text fields, lines, sections, and so on) or the entire document. For formatting ideas, see Useful formatting suggestions. For information on the types of formatting that is available for each type of control, see the following sections:

• Formatting text fields

• Formatting HTML containers

• Formatting shapes

• Formatting images

• Formatting Grid/Graphs

• Formatting panels and panel stacks

• Formatting selectors

• Formatting widgets in MicroStrategy Developer

• Formatting sections

Individual controls can be automatically formatted differently than the data in the rest of the document. Data that is formatted differently calls attention to itself, and makes that data easier to locate for analysis. Conditional formatting allows certain properties of controls, including sections, to be controlled by data-driven conditions. This provides the flexibility to personalize documents based on the data returned by the dataset reports. For more information, including instructions and examples, see Formatting conditional values in documents.

You can also format the entire document, as described below:

• Formatting the border and background of a document

  If the document contains multiple layouts, you can also format the border and background of each layout, as described in Formatting layout borders and backgrounds.

• Formatting documents using predefined formats (Autostyles), which allows you to copy formatting information from one document to another.

  An Autostyle is a collection of formatting properties saved for various control types, and is applied to a document to change its formatting or appearance.

• Adding watermarks to documents. Watermarks are faint designs or text appearing in the background of the document, typically to identify or decorate pages.

• Formatting a document for printing. These settings control how the document will look when it is printed. These settings include:

  • Pagination (see Adding page breaks to documents and Adding page numbers to documents)

  • Font embedding

  • Graph resolution

  • Bookmarks

  • Tables of contents

  • Common page setup options such as margins, paper size, orientation (landscape or portrait), and scaling (see Modifying page setup options

  • Horizontal overflow, which determines whether controls that extend beyond the width of a single page are printed on the next page or on the same page

• Formatting a document for MicroStrategy Web. Before you can preview a document as it will look in MicroStrategy Web, you must enable Flash View and/or HTML View. Before you can view it in MicroStrategy Web, you must select the modes that it can be displayed in. Fonts must be embedded if the document uses anti-aliasing, vertical text, or rotated graph labels.

• Formatting a document for export. Before you export a document to Microsoft Excel, a PDF file, an MHT file, or a separate browser window, you must select the formats that the document can be exported to and specify default exporting options.

For a list of the options available on various formatting interfaces, and when to use them, see Different methods for formatting controls.