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Crystal Reports Basics: Solving a Crowded Page

This is based on the book, Crystal Reports: A Beginner’s Guide. For more detail and explanation, plus practice exercises, order the book here.

What should you do, if your report looks crowded because of all the groups and fields you have? Before you agonize too much over what to delete or what font sizes to use, try changing the orientation and the margins.

Crystal Reports will, by default, set up your page as a letter-sized page in portrait orientation. Changing to a landscape orientation significantly increases the horizontal space. You can also adjust the margins for less border and more useable page, but be careful not to exceed the abilities of your printer.

Now, that brings us to another aspect of crowding: gratuitous data. The whole purpose of a business intelligence report is to provide information instead of data.

How do you get from data to information?

Instead of starting with the database, start with the business questions. Talk with the senior executives (who may or may not be on your existing distribution list), and ask each one to tell you what the top three business questions are. If they give you more, that's OK. Compile a list, and see what data you would need for you to answer those questions with your reports.

Next, repeat this process with the people who are already on your distribution list. You are now ready to determine what will be reported.

Why talk with the senior executives, first? Those are the folks who run your company, so figure out what they want. Providing that helps secure your job and future raises in no small way. But it also helps you build the correct framework for your entire process, so that all users are marching to the same tune. You have to start at the beginning, not in the middle. By definition, middle managers can't see the big picture.

This raises another point. Surveys conducted between 2005 and 2008 showed that senior executives rarely have an accurate picture of their organization or the conditions under which it operates. They have a much rosier view, because people generally try to please them. These same people lack the time to dig through the data to see the real picture. In most companies, senior executives also lack the skills to do so. This means the data-oriented reports they get are essentially useless. If you are in charge of those reports, what does this say about your value to the company?

If you provide the senior executives with the business information they need, and you provide middle managers with the business information they need plus the business information the senior executives are working from, how do you think this will affect the effectiveness of management to make good decisions?

Instead of working from the detail level up, work from the information level down. Determine what information people really need. Then, use the power of Crystal Reports to assemble that information from the data you can get.

The uncrowded page is a key aspect of any good design. Make a point of looking for things that compete for attention with the items that are most important. Look at each item and decide what to do about it. For example:

Delete it outright (that is, stop providing information people really don't want anyhow).
Make it smaller (for example, some graphic that overwhelms the page or looks like a call to action but is just decorative).
Move to another page or another report, with just a reference link or reference note.
Move to an online repository, with just a reference link or reference note. For example, "Full details here."
Redesign the page for more white space around the core material.
Replace full texts with summary texts (truncate the source text to X number of characters).
Use dynamic graphics, rather than long text or multiple static graphics (multiples that include graphics that don't apply to the present report conditions).

Whatever you do, don't shrink fonts and graphics into illegibility. That's cheating, and it can easily make the report totally useless because people can't read it. Use good design and make tough decisions, rather than cram everything into too little space by shrinking it to make it fit.

For even more functionality, you can use third-party programs, such as the ones available here.

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.