Hence the popularity of the spreadsheet. Its main advantage is that here, unlike the database, form and content are one: what you see is how it's stored (WYSIHIS?). There's no need to normalize, join and otherwise transform anything, because the data's right there. (The pivot table breaks this rule, but the user who's happy creating one of those is probably running Microsoft Access somewhere anyway)

In contrast, the database package insulates the user from the raw data through levels of views, queries and report formatting. Those levels are typically the domain of someone in the IT department who gets turned on by structures, relationships and high-level programming. And yet the data doesnt have to play so hard to get.

This then is the OfficeWriter approach: from the Ms Office front-end, reports are produced in the SSRS XML-based RDL format, then uploaded to the SSRS ReportServer database, like any report produced using Visual Studio (VS). This means that they can also be viewed in Report Manager along with any other SSRS reports you have.

Fields are allowed either to appear once, i.e. at the document' level, or they're assumed to be repeated on multiple rows of the detail section. These are easily identified by the %%= prefix used in the cell as a data marker. Within this simple structure, the user can place and format the fields as required in the familiar spreadsheet grid.

The facility for writing formulas brings up a window similar to the one in VS for creating expressions. This means that not only the fields and parameters are available for use but also ready-formed aggregates and global constants.

Reports can also be designed and displayed in Word. Here, the same toolbar is used, but the user has the line-based placement of the word-processor rather than the more formal spreadsheet grid. This allows a more flexible approach to form design similar to the List' control in VS.

An example of where this flexibility can be put to good use is in producing a customer-based report where different groups of repetitive data (e.g. sales, enquiries, other responses), having different numbers and widths of columns, need to be accommodated on the one report. In fact any output which needs to be presented as a form, e.g. one which might need to be signed in ink, can be written this way. Trying to do this in Excel results in lots of extra columns, often containing blank cells; a situation which SSRS savants are used to seeing in exports to Excel.

A feature of the latest version of OfficeWriter (3.6.1) is that the one RDL file, can handle both Word and Excel versions of a report. You can therefore open the file in either application and have the features appropriate to that one available for viewing.

One outcome of all this is that you now get two further Export options in Report Manager.

OfficeWriter uses Ms Query, but the link doesn't appear by default requiring a tweak in the registry to enable 3 extra buttons to appear on the toolbar: Add Query, Edit Query and Delete Query. With the first of these you can go straight into Ms Query, choose your database connection, pull in tables and build your SQL. Parameters are also setup here and if you want them to be editable at run-time, you can enter a phrase in square brackets in the criteria line, as in Ms Access.

If you don't want users to design their own queries, this option is easily turned off from the registry, which also includes some other basic switches for controlling the reporting environment.

At this point, it's worth mentioning Microsoft's own SSRS Report Builder (RB), which provides another way of presenting fields from the database ready for use. Here you are asked to produce, in order, a data source, a data source view (which includes specifying links between tables) and finally the report model itself. This is all meant to be done behind the scenes by the IT department, so the end user only sees the model, from which they can select the required fields (data types are indicated by icons) and place them in either a table, matrix or chart.

It's debatable which solution requires more of the database expert and which more of the end user who is trying to create a report. The Ms Query approach gives the user more flexibility, but then they need to be more savvy about tables and joins. With the more finely honed RB report model, the three RB controls focus the user more on the layout and interrelationships of the data rather than the minutiae of formatting and presentation.

I have to say firstly that installation did present some problems, but that these were almost wholly to do with the state of the already installed SQL Server 2005 instance on my particular machine.

I already had the client tools installed, but the addition of the server-side functionality (which I used as the testbed) didn't want to play ball straightaway. So http://localhost/reportserver at first showed nothing, although our networked installation of SSRS was recognized immediately and I was also able to publish to it even before I realized what I was doing! It's perhaps worth noting that a default full' installation of SS2005, installs everything except the AdventureWorks database, on which the sample OfficeWriter reports were based. The only other complaint came from the .NET Framework, but after I re-installed this, it all worked like clockwork.

The installation includes two products, the renderer and the designer, and the install eventually went smoothly when running these separately rather than launching the second from the first.

OfficeWriter is a neat solution which for perennial spreadsheet users, should provide an easy way in to the low-level data from which they are normally barred. It's an advance for user democracy and also a way for those report-writing folk in IT to free up their time for the more stimulating and perhaps esoteric type of information delivery such as data cubes and others more worthy of the term business intelligence.

The Word version does actually provide something which was one of the very few omissions I noticed when we first deployed SSRS: something to output data, often long pieces of text, in a format that could be easily amended in a word-processor, printed off and signed.

If I had a suggestion for how the good folk at SoftArtisans might develop their product further, it would be to base their queries on the Report Builder model rather than introduce Ms Query, which is a bit long in the tooth now (even the 2003 version has the look and feel of Excel 4). Other than that they've produced a clever and well-integrated addition to the functionality of SSRS which will be an answer to the prayers of many numerate folk whose only shortcoming is that they don't work in IT.