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Crystal Reports Basics: Report Design Experts
This is based on the book, Crystal
Reports: A Beginner’s Guide. For more detail and explanation, plus
practice exercises, order the book here.
Crystal Reports provides several report design experts that are
especially helpful to beginners. The book on which this article is based
contains numerous tips to help you work effectively with them. Here’s a
partial list of what they are and what they do:
- Standard Report Expert. This is the most commonly used of the
Experts. It allows you to create list reports with grouping, sorting,
and other features. You can add graphs and predefined styles, as well.
You can have it answer a query such as, "Show me my 10 worst
customers," so you stop wasting resources and instead provide
better service to all of your customers.
- Form Letter Expert. This essentially is a "mail merge"
function, and a big time-saver.
- Form Expert. This allows you to print onto existing company paper
forms.
- Cross-Tab Expert. It gives you spreadsheet functionality.
- Subreport Expert. This has many functions, such as producing a
report within a report and doing unrelated joins.
- Mail Label Expert. Create labels in varying formats.
- Drill Down Expert. Use this to create summaries that allow users to
see the details if they wish.
- Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) Expert. This allows you to work
with advanced databases that use the OLAP convention (as opposed to
relational databases, which use a two-dimensional view).
The various experts really add power to Crystal
Reports. You don’t need to know how to use them to create a simple
report, but at some point you are going to want the added functionality.
For even more functionality, you can use third-party programs, such as the
ones available here.
Now, what about your own expertise? You'll need to develop that. The wizards and
experts in software programs are like training wheels. They help when you are
just getting used to the idea of being on a bike. But after you get a little
experience, they start to be more of a drag on your performance than a help.
You want to get rid of the need for training wheels as soon as possible. Here
are some tips:
- Keep a running journal. Amazingly, paper works well for this. The mere
act of writing things down helps you learn, and makes a huge difference.
- Read books on Crystal Reports. You don't have to spend huge amounts of
time doing this, and there really aren't all that many books available. Just
buy one and set aside 15 minutes each day to read something in it. If the
book has a practice problem, schedule some time to do that.
- Join a local user group. If there isn't one, start one.
- Read articles like the ones on Crystalkeen.
- Ask users what they want in their reporting system. Then refer to the
Crystal Reports books you've been reading to see how to do that. This
immerses you in your learning, rather than making it purely academic.
- Read the help files. Seriously. Keep a running Outlook appointment (or
use some other time scheduling tool) to read one or two per day.
Don't forget to read about our Crystal Reports
viewers,
analyzers, and
schedulers.
Other resources
This article is copyrighted by Crystalkeen, Mindconnection, and Chelsea Technologies Ltd.
It may be freely copied and distributed as long as the
original copyright is displayed and no modifications are made to this
material. Extracts are permitted. The names Crystal Reports and Seagate
Info are trademarks owned by Business Objects. |
