Can't Find Report Designer

If you can't find the SQL Reporting Services Report Designer, but you can see the Reporting Services Books Online and Samples, you're looking in the wrong place.

The first thing you need to verify is if you have Visual Studio .Net (2003 is the required version as of this writing) installed. If you do not have it installed, then you need to install it.

If you do have it installed:

1) Open Visual Studio .Net 2003
2) Navigate to File -> New Project and look for the
Business Intelligence Projects folder. The Report
Project Wizard and Report Project icons should be
listed underneath this folder.

If you don't see Business Intelligence Projects in your Visual Studio, it could be because you installed SQL Reporting Services *before* you installed Visual Studio. You will need to re-install Reporting Services in order to access the Report Designer.

Note: Reporting Services Prerequisites are quite literal. If you are missing any of them, Report Designer and other tools will not install properly. The MDAC 2.6 and ASP.Net files are usually installed with Internet Explorer 5.0 (with latest Service Packs installed) and with Visual Studio .Net 2003. A SQL Server installation with Service Pack 3a (and appropriate licensing) along with an IIS Server (preferably with SSL set up for security reasons) is also required.

See SQL Reporting Services Books Online -> Installing Reporting Services -> Software Requirements... for further details.

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