Crystal Reports: Hyperlink Fields

You can also create a hyperlink from a text object or a picture on your report.

So, your Web enabled reports can include much of the functionality of Web documents with links to other pages in the Web.

Linking? We don't need no stinking linking. Or do we?

Now, this brings up a whole topic unto itself. And it's not a technical one. Designers of e-commerce sites figured out long ago that you don't want to send visitors away from your site. They don't spend money, that way. Instead, you move them through what's called the "conversion funnel." The goal, of course, is to get them through checkout and to the final invoice page.

With reporting, you don't have the goal of moving someone through checkout. But you still need to keep your "customer" (person reading the report) focused. If the report is full of links to material that's only tangential and doesn't help the "customer" get through "checkout," the person reading the report is going to feel frustrated.

Here's an example. Have you ever tried to research something technical in a vendor's online help system, only to get frustrated because you go round and round? You click a link to proceed, and up comes another info page. So you click a link there, and then another link and you're back on the page where you started. So you click a link, and then another, and then another, and you're on a page you just saw five minutes ago.

One factor in this is relevance. You "could" link to something that is relevant to the material in the report but not relevant to the mission of the report. For example, this report gives an overview of the 10 most profitable customer accounts. It has a link to the home page of each customer. That's not a bad idea; anyone interested in what that customer actually does can just click the link.

But, gee, wouldn't it be nice to also link to each customer's Facebook page? And other social media pages? No, it would not. While some people do have hours on end to waste "liking" people they don't know, this is not something that's going to help the readers of this report. The report readers are trusting the report designer to limit the scope of the report to what is going to help the readers make intelligent business decisions.

If someone really does want that other info and has a good business reason to obtain it, that person can find the appropriate links on the customer's site. You don't need to add those "calls to action" in this report.

Call to action? Yes. Any outbound link in your report is asking to be clicked. And if people are clicking links for no good business reason, your report is actually hurting their performance. Consider that when adding any link.

Another factor is the anchor text. This is the text the link is behind. In the early days of the Internet, the anchor text was usually "Click Here." That doesn't convey much information, does it? If your link is going to Riley's Sales Figures (a page that Riley arduously maintains, being the top rainmaker in your company), then make Riley's Sales Figures the anchor text. That way, people can immediately see what they would be clicking on and can decide if they actually want to click.

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