Why can't I see the "Report Data" window when creating reports?

The most common answer to this problem is to go to the Data menu and choose Show Data Sources. This option does not appear for me.

The Show Report Data Pane keyboard shortcut did work for me: CTRL+ALT+D. There is nothing in the menus that I could find that does this same thing.


After I accidentally closed this window, I took an hour to find how to bring it back up.

The right answer is indeed: View-->Report Data (ctrl+alt+D)

The tricky part: the 'Report Data' entry does not always appear in the 'View' dropdown. Make sure that you have a report open, and some element of the report selected.

If you're not 'in the report', the entry disappears from the menu.

View > Report Data


Hi I faced the same issue in VS2008, I tried based on the post 8 (Thanks to the "Tricky part" section in that)

The (Ctrl+Alt+D) combo did not work there in VS2008, but after opening the Report file(rdlc) I browsed on the View menu and found out that View->Toolbars->Data Design is the solution for that.

Upon opening that we get around 4 icons of which the "Show Data Sources" section brings the "Website Data Sources" section which fetches all Entities, Typed DataSets etc.

The keybord shortcut is (Shift+Alt+D).

The twisty part here is the "Data Sources" section available with the Server Explorer toolbar doesnt bring up any stuff but the "Website Data Sources" brings all the needed., can somebody explain that to me.