Crystal Reports: Template Expert

Change the appearance of your report with the Template Expert. The Template Expert is a neat feature introduced in Crystal Reports 9.0. You can use any report as a template and apply its style and formatting to another report.

If the new template doesn’t look the way you want, you can either undo the current template or apply another template.

One thing we have discovered in our investigation of version 9.0 is that the “Undo” goes back only one step. So if you are experimenting with several templates, you should undo the current template before you apply a new template. Alternatively, have your own template with no formatting, in effect creating your own blank template.

This a great feature for quickly applying a consistent look and feel across a range of reports.

More about templates

With each new version of Crystal Reports, we get a little more of the UI improvement we see outside Crystal Reports. With templates, this has been slow to arrive. For example, Microsoft Word made the use of templates very easy. Back in 1997.

Today, most programs for designers use templates. By designers, we mean Web designers, report designers, graphics designers, and others who produce corporate quality documentation.

Long before electronic documents existed, draftsmen were using templates to pencil drawings on paper. A template was a plastic or metal plate with shapes cut into it. The template might contain circles, squares, ellipses, or rectangles of varying sizes. Some templates would permit the exact drawings of specific kinds of curves, such as French curves.

The advantages these brought were:

• Speed. Rather than painstakingly draw an object, shape, or symbol, you just swished your pencil around the perimeter of a cutout in a plate.

• Reproducibility. You can make the same exact shape over and over.

• Consistency. If you drew a 1/8 inch circle, it looked the same on every drawing. If you had a symbol, such as your trademark, it looked the same on every drawing.

The original concept of an electronic template was based on the paper one. The template gave you the outline of what you were creating.

The electronic template concept has since grown to include not just an outline, but also attributes that automatically update all documents using the template. What's in the template may include such things as:

• Included elements. Documents assigned to Template A might also include a disclaimer, while those assigned to Template B do not.

• Formatting. This applies to the content. Any content in this template will be formatted per the template. For example, MS-Word's styles. Extremely useful and multi-layered.

• Layout. Similar to formatting, but for the document overall.

• Headers and footers. Not the best use for template level control, but often done.

• Specific content. Web developers might create a template with specific product text, and assign that template to all SKUs related to a specific line of products (they vary in some aspect, but are otherwise identical--language translators, for example).

Templates have many advantages, and as you use templates you tend to find new advantages you hadn't thought of before. But generally, they are going to be derivatives of the original three: speed, reproducibility, and consistency.

Crystal Reports added more extensive template-related features in later versions, and sometimes the template features alone justify an upgrade to the latest version. This is especially true if your current version doesn't have chart templates.

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