Crystal Report basics
To use Crystal Reports, you first have to pick the type of report you want to create. You are given a number of templates, such as standard reports, cross-tabulations, form letters, and a custom option. If you look at Figure B, you can see that the report expert will provide you with a screen nicely tabbed for each major component of the report. This expert makes it so easy to create reports, that I have gotten to the point where I can do over 50% of the work using the expert.

FIGURE B


The Standard Report Expert can create a report with a minimal amount of information. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Once you complete the expert you can really get fancy with your report features. Seagate improved the formula editor in version 7.0. The main additions are the ability to change the size of the sections of the formula editor, the use of bookmarks within a formula, and the find and replace feature. I found the most helpful of these to be the new find and replace feature. This is a pretty basic feature of most development tools, so it's not a surprise that it was added.

Adding a bookmark is done with a right click or tool bar button click. The bookmarks, however, are really only helpful if you write really long formulas. I have found that a majority of my formulas are relatively short, less than 10 lines. The bookmarks were pretty nice to have in the beginning, but the more I worked with them, the more I found myself annoyed because I couldn't navigate between bookmarks within different formulas. While this is probably not a feature that you will use often, if you have one long function and it saves you a few minutes of digging thorough code, then take advantage of it.

Drill down sections
My favorite feature of Crystal Reports 7.0 was by far the ability to drill down into a section of a report on demand. In my experience, I have found that I am usually creating two kinds of reports. One is a high level report and the other is a detail report supporting the high-level report. Usually, the detail report is only looked at if there is a question about the supporting information.

Here is a wonderful way to only have one report. As groups are added to your report, you can set an option to hide a data group. This allows users to drill down into the group and view any detail that may be below it. The drill down is done with a double click. So instead of creating two separate reports, you can make one report with all the information you need and have nested hidden sections within it. This feature is good for reports with a large amount of supporting data that will be viewed online. If you do financial reports, this is definitely for you.

Conditional formatting for numbers
When using the Highlighting Expert on number and currency fields, you can see in Figure C that you can completely change the look of the field without writing a line of code. This expert provides an easy interface that allows you to enter in a conditional statement, or statements, and change everything from the background color to the outline effect on a field.