Customize reports in advance?

[Donald Allen]

Running Gnucash 2.0.1 on an up-to-date Gentoo system.

The only way I've found to generate a customized transaction report is this:
if I want a transaction report for a specific account over a specific time
period, I click Reports -> Transaction Report and when that report has been
generated, I open it via the tab, click the 'Options' button and customize
the time period and accounts there. That works, but the problem is that
generating the initial uncustomized report can be time-consuming. I'm
running this on a fast Thinkpad G41 (3+ Ghz processor, 2Gb ram, 7200 rpm
disk with plenty of space) and that initial report generation is annoyingly
slow. I have two other laptops that I rsync with this one for use under
various circumstances and they are both much slower than this machine. So,
my question is: is there some way to specify, in advance, how I want a
transaction report generated without first grinding through the generation
of a report I don't care about?

/Don Allen