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.