A Table report presents data in a simple tabular layout, similar to an Excel worksheet.

Unlike Pivot reports, Table reports do not allow you to have multiple levels of row or column breakouts, or exchange rows and columns.

But you can still do a lot: you can reorder columns, sort data, group (with group-totals), and include grand totals. You can add new calculated fields, conditionally format, and more.

Table Reports have two other advantages:

• They are simpler. If you don’t need to create a multi-level row or column breakouts, or turn your columns into rows (or vice-versa) then table reports will do fine.
• They are very fast, even faster than pivot reports, especially for extremely large data sets.

Two Types of Table Reports

Here’s an example of a single-level table report.                                                                                                                                             

A multi-level table report - often called a “parent-child” or a “master-detail” report - contains more than one related table of data, and allows drill-down from one level to the next.

Here is a 3-level master / detail report showing some fictional customer activity. For each customer there is a set of related documents (e.g. invoices), and for each invoice there can be an associated set of related payments.                                                       

Drilling down into one of the customer rows by clicking on one of the “+” icons, we see Documents, presenting a table of the documents that are associated with the customer.