Crystal Reports: Duplex Printing

As printing technology keeps getting cheaper, we find some amazing printing features installed in our offices. One great feature is the ability of a printer to duplex print--that is, print on both sides of the page without manual intervention.

If you use this with your reports, you can reduce your paper requirement by almost half.

But there is one problem you need to solve. It is not practical or advisable to print two the output for different customers or departments on opposite sides of the same page. We need a way to force each group to start on an odd page.

The solution is to create a second group footer section, and conditionally format “New Page Before” with Remainder:

(PageNumber,2) <>0

Solving the root cause

Now, this leads to another line of thinking. Why are people converting reports to dead tree format, in the first place? Some people also print every e-mail, a wasteful practice that erases several advantages of e-mail. Printing not only wastes paper and ink (or toner, as the case may be), it wastes time.

What you really want to do is eliminate the perceived need to print. Begin by examining your reports. If they are particularly dense with data, people will usually print them out for their reading stack. The main reason people print is they don't want to deal with the subject at the moment but they do want to "handle" the report or e-mail immediately to get it out of their inbox or off their screen.

So, first look at whether your report is providing business intelligence information or whether it's just a data dump. The typical report is not designed very well, and is just a reformatting of data. Which is why managers then further waste time (in addition to printing) by exporting to Excel for the purpose of trying to make sense of the data. We will discuss this more, in a moment, under "Report or Data Dump?".

After you clean up your reports so they are providing answers to the business questions that the report users are asking (as far as possible, given the available data), work on the formatting of the report. Some things to look at:

• Is it crammed with too many distractions? Get rid of the superfluous.

• Does it encompass too much? Make each report as specific and focused as possible. Target specific users and specific needs with each report.

• Is color usage judicious and helpful (guides the eye), or is it distracting?

• Do headings and subheadings properly break up the report into manageable sections?

Next, look at features that printing defeats. For example, drilldowns and hyperlinks. Try to make use of these in every report, so that users have a reason NOT to print the report.

Finally, include a request in the report footer, "Please think before printing this report. If you don't need to consume your time and kill some trees by printing, then don't print." Change this every few days, so it's not something people just gloss over and disregard. Occasionally, change the request to something that asks how the report can be improved and include your contact info as a hyperlink that opens the e-mail client but don't make the address itself printable. For example, make an e-mail link behind "Need to complain about this report? Click here!"

Report or Data Dump?

• Which employees bring the most value to the company? You have various data at hand to help determine the answer. The "layoff by spreadsheet" method focuses on labor cost per hour. It ignores that Employee X worked hard on his own time to get a particular idea adopted, and that idea now brings in twice X's salary in profit each year. It makes sense to keep X on the payroll, even if X gets 11 months of paid vacation each year. It's likely that X will keep producing such ideas, simply because X has already proven he's the smart, tenacious person who makes far more money for the company than he's paid. But the spreadsheet won't show this. A report can.
   
• Which customers produce the lowest net profit? The dressed up data approach looks at only part of the picture. For Example, ACME Holdings spends $1 million a year with your company. The nominal profit margin is 22%. Looks great on a spreadsheet, and you have the data to back it up. But what you don't have is the cost of servicing ACME Holdings. The sales people love ACME Holdings, but the support department hates them. It turns out that it costs your company $1.03 for every dollar ACME Holdings spends. A report that provides this business information helps your company tremendously.
   
• What is the real compliance cost of Sarbanes-Oxley? This legislation is hugely expensive. The GAO reported that it costs the top ten USA banks $83 million a year to comply with it. Corporate boards and stockholders really have no idea how damaging S-O and other misguided laws are. Nor do your company's customers understand how much they pay for these laws with every purchase.
  
  Yet, even years after it has passed, there is no evidence that S-O does anything to prevent the crimes it was intended to prevent. In fact, S-O drains off resources that could be used for that purpose. S-O isn't even aimed at where the problem really is. Getting such nonsense repealed can happen only if a large number of people can clearly see how deeply they are gouged to pay for this useless law. As the true compliance costs also include other factors such as opportunity costs, you can't extract this from any database. You must calculate it.

When people want to export data to Excel, they are usually attempting to answer questions not directly answered by the data. In the examples above, you would have to perform analysis in the report, using formulas and other tools available in the reporting software.

The data approach

The normal approach is to start with the database and push data to the users. No matter how you dress up data, you still have data. You do not have information. Data are raw materials and information is a finished product.

Suppose you walk into a Toyota dealer and say you need transportation. Do you expect to walk out of there with a container of parts, or to drive out of there in a car? That is the difference between data and information.

When you shove data at people, they try to assemble the data into information. Which is why you have all these folks wasting millions of salary-hours manipulating spreadsheets instead of doing the jobs they are paid to do. Which is why you have information silos. Which is why you have all sorts of other problems, which is why your job is less secure than it should be.

End-users need analysis, trends, conclusions, snapshots, summaries, thumbnails, overviews, projections, comparisons, and other things that are very different from data. When they don't have those things, out come the spreadsheets.

The report approach

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.

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