Each report element (band and control) and the report itself, has a group of properties specifying the element's appearance, such as Background Color, Borders, Border Color, Border Width, Font, Foreground Color, Padding and Text Alignment. By default, these properties are set to no, meaning that their’s are obtained from their parent element control or band. In turn, this means that these appearance-related properties, defined for a parent, are inherited by their child elements.

If it is subsequently required to reset a child element’s appearance property to that of the parent, right-click the property in the Property Grid, and in the displayed menu, click Reset.

Additionally, there can be styles created in a report. A report's styles are stored in the report's Style Sheet collection. A style stored within this collection has a set of the same appearance properties as a control or a band has.

There are two ways to store a report's style sheets. The first approach is to save them to external files (with the REPSS extension), and then load them into a report using its Style Sheet Path property in read-only mode (this is described at Store and Restore Style Sheets). The second is to store the style sheets within the report (using the Style Sheet property), so that they can be modified, if required, and saved with the report itself.

Finally, the styles can be assigned to a report's bands and controls. A band or control can therefore obtain its appearance either from a style assigned to it, or from the control's own appearance properties. In this case, the control's Style Priority property allows the user to define the required behaviour of the control's final appearance.

By default, all the Style Priority's options (Style Priority.Use Background Color, Style Priority.Use Border Color, etc.), which follow the structure of the style and appearance properties, are set to Yes (except the Use Text Alignment). Which means that if any style is assigned to a control via its Styles property, all its properties will have a higher priority than the properties stored in the control or in its parent. If some of the properties are to be determined by a control, rather than its style, set the corresponding Use* property to No.

The following image demonstrates how the Style Priority property works.

Another commonly used feature is odd-even styles. These allow the user to visually delimit alternating data fields in a report, for better readability. More information about this can be found in Use of Odd and Even Styles.