Breaks are divisions between parts of a report (such as page breaks) or between groups of data in your report (for instance, between data for Employee 1 and Employee 2). You specify breaks between groups of data by designating certain columns in a report as break columns. A break occurs when Report-Writer encounters a change of value in a break column while reading the data.

You can instruct Report-Writer to perform some action after a break has occurred by placing formatting instructions, called break actions, in a header or footer section associated with the break column. For example, you can instruct Report-Writer to print heading information for the next group of data rows, print summary information for the data rows associated with the last break column value, or skip to a new page and print a page header.

When running a report, several types of breaks occur automatically:

You can also specify break actions to occur at the top and bottom of pages. Page breaks occur when the report comes within a specified number of lines at the end of the page. You can define the page size to fit your needs, or specify a page footer to be printed at the page break, followed by a page header at the top of the next page. You might want to print page numbers, the current date or time, values of data items currently being processed by the report, or any number of other items.