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Property reports present data contained in the custom properties of shapes in your drawing, as well as information about shapes. For example, you can generate an inventory report from the data stored with furniture and equipment shapes in an office layout. Or you can generate a list of the people represented in an organization chart, including their names and departments, and a count of the number of staff.

Microsoft Office Visio installs 22 sample report definitions that you can use for common reports in your drawings. You can use these definitions, modify them to incorporate any custom properties that you've added to your drawings, or create new report definitions using the Report Definition wizard.

You can format a report as a Web page (HTML file) or an XML file. If you have Microsoft Office Excel installed, you can also format a report as an Excel worksheet (.xls) or as an embedded Excel object that is saved as a report shape in your drawing.

Report definitions

All of the information needed to generate a report is saved in a report definition. A report definition determines which shapes and properties are included in the report and how the information in the report is sorted. You can save a report definition in a file or directly in a drawing. If you want to use the same report definition to generate reports for multiple drawings, save the report definition in a file. If you want to define a report specifically for a drawing that you're going to share with others, save the definition with the drawing.

When you generate a report, the Reports dialog box lists all report definitions that are located in the Visio installation folder (installation folder: The location where Visio is installed; the default folder location is Program Files\Microsoft Office\Visio11.) and in your drawing folder (Drawing path: The default location, which is the My Documents folder, where Visio drawings you create are stored.).

You can set up report definitions to summarize data by including subtotals and grand totals in the generated report. You can also set the sort order of columns and rows in your report.