At one time, creating a good-looking report involved these steps:

• Extracting data from a database and into a text file
• Possibly manipulating those data in an intermediary program, like Excel
• Importing those data into a word processor or desktop publishing program and cleaning them up
• Formatting everything and playing with various settings until it looks OK.

With Crystal Reports, you can—in most cases—create reports directly from the database. This saves a lot of extra work—non-value added work that is terribly boring.

Crystal Reports has:

• A full range of text formatting options
• Text rotation
• The ability to set object foreground and background colors
• Settable unique borders
• Drop shadows
• Special fonts
• Ability to include bitmapped images
• Ability to draw lines and boxes around areas you wish to highlight
• An actual highlighting feature that changes background colors conditionally
• A host of conditional formatting options
• A host of absolute formatting options
• The Suppress Property, which allows you to hide information (such as zeroes or empty field items)—this is similar to Word’s ability to suppress unused fields in a mail merge. It also allows you to do some cool things with page headers and footers.

In addition, you can use Report Alerts that activate every time you refresh the report. This feature provides a separate dialog box to give you a report history. It’s got some automation to it to reduce the drudgery of digging through large report histories.