Crystal Reports 10

How This Book Is Organized

This book contains six major parts. Each part contains several chapters.

Part I: Reporting Basics

Part I introduces you to Crystal Reports and the art of report creation. You find out what a report should accomplish and what it should look like. Then you fire up Crystal Reports and use it to create a simple report based on data held in a database.
Part II: Moving Up to Professional Quality Reports

You can do many things beyond the basics to make reports more focused, more readable, and easier on the eye. This part gives you the information you need to do all those things.

Part III: Advanced Report Types and Features

Part III gets into serious report creation. With the information in this part, you can zero in on exactly the data you want and display it in the most understand¬able way. You’ll be able to nest one report within another, pull report elements from multiple non-database sources, present multidimensional data in OLAP cubes, and illustrate points with charts and maps. With these tools, you can produce reports fit for the eyes of the orga

Part IV: Crystal Reports in the Enterprise

Crystal Enterprise is a companion product to Crystal Reports that controls and secures the distribution of reports. With it you can make your reports accessible to people on your local area network, or on the World Wide Web. Crystal Enterprise’s new Business Views capability enables report developers to custom tailor a report based on the interests of the people who will be viewing it. There can be multiple different Business Views of a single report. Crystal Enterprise is also the home of the Crystal Repository, which is a great place to store formulas, custom functions, or Business Views, so they can be used again later.

Part V: Publishing Your Reports

After you create a report, you’ll want to make it available to the people who need it. Crystal Reports makes it easy for you to distribute your report for viewing, whether to colleagues in your organization or to Internet users around the world. In addition, you can publish your reports using traditional meth¬ods. You can print it; export it to a file, or fax it to people far away. After you complete report development, distribution is easy.

Although Crystal Reports does a great job when used all by itself, you can also incorporate it into applications written in a computer language. Crystal Reports’ SQL Commands facility gives you direct control over the data in a report’s underlying database. Because a version of Crystal Reports is included as an integral part of Microsoft’s .NET application development environment, you can incorporate the power of Crystal Reports into applications you write in Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C#, or any language compatible with the .NET framework. This gives the applications you write the sophistication of the world’s leading report writer.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

It’s always good to remember short lists of best practices. That’s what the Part of Tens is all about. Listed here are pointers that help you produce out¬standing reports with minimum effort, in the shortest possible time.nization’s CEO.
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