Report Writer is a standard built-in feature of COBOL that prints lines, pages, or sophisticated layouts anywhere you want within a COBOL program. You save time in coding a print layout because you define it entirely in the Data Division. You only need very few Procedure Division statements as they print whole blocks of lines at once, moving and editing data automatically, as well performing such tasks as page headings and footings, totaling, displaying dates and organizing tables.

Do not confuse Report Writer with report generators! It is part of the COBOL language like, for example, indexed files or object orientation.

Want to learn the basics? Click on "Tutorial and Reference" and browse the first chapter.

The "Tutorial and Reference" is an all-platform readable and authoritative source of all the current Report Writer features.

Users of IBM COBOL Report Writer Precompiler can download a bookshelf of all the current publications for browsing with BookManager. Versions of both manuals are now available for download in PDF format.