The Layout Area displays the layout of the report.

The Layout Area is organized by bands. That is, objects that appear in the report appear in one of several bands, such as the PageHeader or Detail bands. A bar showing the band name appears at the left of the Layout Area for a band. The space to the right of the bar is for the objects in that band. Click the box for a band to select the band. Click it a second time to collapse it or again to expand it. To resize a band, position your mouse pointer at the bottom of the band's box and drag up or down. You can also change the height by editing the Height property in the Properties Panel. You cannot make a band smaller than the bottom of the lowest object in the band.

The ruler at the left is broken into sections, one for each band. There's also a ruler at the top. In both rulers, the light-colored part shows the area on the page and the darker part shows the area off the page, including the margins.

A grid pattern is laid out over the Layout Area to help you align objects. If an object isn't quite aligned to the grid, you can click the Align to Grid button in the Properties panel. By default, there are grid lines every 1/8 of an inch. To change the grid scale, select the report in the object list in the Property panel (it's the object with the spaces in the name of the report replaced with underscores, such as "Customer_Listing_Springy", and "XtraReport" as the type) and edit the Snap Grid Size property value in the Design section. By default, the measurement units of a report are hundredths of an inch, so a value of 12.5 means grid lines appear every 12.5/100 or 1/8 of an inch. To change the measurement units, edit the value of the Measure Units property in the Behavior section; the choices are Hundredths of an Inch, Tenths of a Millimeter, or Pixels.

Click an object to select it. Doing so displays its properties in the Properties panel. You can also select an object in the object list. A selected object displays with small squares, called "handles", at each corner and in the middle of each side. To resize the object, drag one of the handles until the object is the desired size. To move an object, drag it to the desired position.

You can select several objects at the same time by holding down the Ctrl key while you select objects. You can also select multiple objects by clicking outside one of the desired objects and dragging a "marquee" rectangle around the desired objects; any object even partially inside the marquee is selected. To unselect a selected object, hold down the Ctrl key and click it. Once you have several objects selected, you can change any common properties of all of the objects at once. This is much more convenient than changing the same properties of each object one at a time.