Report-Writer alone provides a sophisticated language for creating and customizing reports with detailed formats and multiple data sources. Report-Writer used in conjunction with RBF provides a way for you to create a report specification in RBF, use its archive operation to save the file as a text file, and then edit the file to add additional Report-Writer features.

RBF is an interactive, visually oriented, forms-based approach to creating simple reports. It offers its own default report styles in addition to the ones available in Report-Writer. In RBF, you can edit the column headings, formats, aggregates, and other parts of a default report in an on‑screen display that shows the overall layout of your report.

Although RBF is not as flexible as the full Report-Writer formatting language described in this guide, it is adequate to create your report.