A blank report in FastReport is presented as a paper. At any part of the page, a user is able to allocate objects, which can display different information (such as text and/or graphics), as well as to define report’s appearance. Let us describe briefly the assignment of the FastReport objects, which are included into the standard package:

-"Band" object allows create a report area, which would have definite behaviour;
-"Text" object display s one or several text lines within the rectangular area;
-"Picture" object display s a graphic file in "BMP", "JPEG", "ICO", "WMF", or "EMF" format;
-"Line" object display s a horizontal or a vertical line;
-"System text" object displays service information (date, time, page number, etc), as well as aggregate values;
-"Subreport" object allows inserting an additional report inside the basic one;
-the objects of "Draw" category represent different geometrical figures (diagonal line, rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, triangle, and diamond);
-"Chart" object displays data in the form of diagrams of different kinds (circle diagram, histogram, and so on);
-"RichText" object displays a formatted text in Rich Text Format (RTF);
-"CheckBox" object displays a checkbox with either a check or a cross;
-"Barcode" object displays data in the form of barcode (many different types of barcodes are available);
-"OLE" object is able to display any object using OLE technology.

The basic objects you would mostly need to work with are the "Band" and "Text" objects. You will acquaint with their capabilities in detail further in this chapter.