Introduction to Crystal Analysis

Crystal Analysis Professional is a new reporting tool from Crystal Decisions that enables organizations to deliver action-based OLAP analysis to business users. It enables better insights to help decision makers affect business performance through interactive analysis. Crystal Analysis Professional takes OLAP reporting to the next level by allowing report designers to create intuitive and highly interactive reports that offer a guided analysis approach to business issues.

Power users implementing Crystal Analysis can create analytical reports, based on OLAP data, using a powerful designer (similar in concept to Crystal Reports). Crystal Analytic Reports can contain many pages, each presenting a different predefined view of the OLAP cube. Data can be presented in tables or visualized through a wide range of charts, exception highlights, data sorts, filters, and/or analytic transition buttons. Business managers can use the resulting analytical reports to drive the business decisions they need to make every day. Figure 20.20 displays a sample analytic report created in Crystal Analysis Professional. These reports, in the same manner as Crystal Reports files, can be published to, secured, managed, and distributed by the Crystal Enterprise solution also available from Crystal Decisions. For more details on Crystal Enterprise, see Hour 23, "Distributing Crystal Reports."

Figure 20.20. A Sample Crystal Analysis report that includes an OLAP grid, chart objects, and several transition buttons for guided analysis.

Although the details of Crystal Analysis are beyond the scope of this book, it is a tool worth investigating if highly interactive analytic reports for OLAP data sources are requirements for any given project you are involved in.