Crystal Reports Administration: Issues vs. Factors

Ido Millet usually does a session at the CR conferences on Report Design tips. Attending one of Ido's sessions can, by itself, justify the entire cost of attending a conference. Here's a concept Ido shared at a conference:

Follow the "IF" design rule. "IF" refers to Issues and Factors.

Look at the data you are collecting in your database. Every field is either an Issue or a Factor.

• Issues are fields you group by or "Select."
• Factors are fields you sum or count.

Taking an Issue and a Factor should create a meaningful report for someone.

• If you are simply reformatting data, you aren't providing a useful report.
• If your report consists of either issues or factors but not both, the report is probably not useful or necessary.

Of course, an Ido Millet session will go into more detail and provide you with a full understanding of why this is so and how it should play in your Crystal Report designs. But this gives you the concept.

Using Excel

One reason developers may avoid creating a proper report (following the IF design rule), is they want to preserve the data so that report recipients can import that data into Excel for analysis. This defies logic.

Excel has a limit of 64000 rows in a worksheet (perhaps greater in recent versions). It's difficult to do large summaries and analysis with big data sets in Excel. That is where Crystal does far better. And, that's looking at just one aspect of the "debate" over whether to provide business intelligence or reformatted data.

Apply to Pareto principle to your IF design.

By conservative analysis, a typical corporate database could produce several hundred reports. Suppose the above analysis results in 100 reports. Then you get 80% of the benefits of those reports from 20 reports. Do that again, and you get 64% (80% of 80%) of the benefits from 4 (20% of 20) reports.

Now, you just need to decide which 4 reports those are.

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