Crystal Reports: An Introduction
by: Jon Roberts
Welcome to the first of hopefully many articles on Crystal Reports. I will attempt through these articles to help you broaden you understanding of Crystal reports and how it can be used to present data, forms and many other layout types.
Crystal Reports is a tool for presenting data. Data used by crystal reports can come from a plethora of different source types. Examples of the data sources supported natively are:
- Access
- ACT!
- ADO.Net
- COM
- Java Beans
- NT Archive Log
- NT Event Log
- ODBC
- OLAP
- OLE
- Oracle
- Outlook
- Xbase
- Excel
- XML
- Paradox
- BTrieve
- MS SQL
- Exchange Folders
- Lotus Domino
- MS CRM
- MS IIS Logs
Crystal Reports allows you the user to create custom layout of the data. This allows you to create basic presentations to complex forms. These forms can represent data as raw text, calculations, pictures, symbols, graphs and colors. Also you can set up indicators to be activated when data be shown meets a defined requirement. These indicators are called alerts. Examples of Crystal Report layouts I have created in the past are:
- Employee ID
- Stop Light (color coded)
- Graph
- Bills of Lading
- Receipts
- Green Bar (old style layout from dot matrix printer days)
- Inventory
- Check list
- Maintenance Records
- Shipment Movement
- End of Month Financial
Crystal Reports allows you also to create custom calculation along with coming with a library of "Common" calculations. Formulas can be written in a Visual basic format or a Crystal Repots custom format. I personally prefer the Visual Basic format. Formulas can be used to return basic number calculations, date Math, Boolean, effect color, font, Hide lays of data, and change symbols. The formula system is one of the strong points of Crystal reports. Once you master the formula system in Crystal Reports a whole new world of report generation will open up to you.
Crystal Reports is the tool needed with any data source to allow creation of understandable data presentation. Too many times when data collection systems are developed the presentation of the data after collection is over looked. Crystal Reports provides the solution to allow rapid development of presentation layer of the data.
The next article will take you through the basics of creating a report. I hope you will find these articles helpful and look forward to any feedback or request you may have.
About Author:
Jon Roberts has been in the IT field for 10+ years. He is Currently a Senior Systems Engineer over seeing day-to-day operations of the global reporting systems for a large international shipping company. Jon Roberts has had over 10 years experience in the creation and implementation of Crystal Reports as a presentation of various data sources. If you would like to know more about Jon Roberts please visit his web site at http://www.ProgrammerVault.Com.
