Understanding the Crystal Reports Gallery

The Report Gallery is a special dialog that is presented when you select to create a new report file. The Report Gallery acts as a shortcut to various report creation wizards, which then provide the guided, visual creation of reports.

As Figure 4.1 illustrates, the Crystal Reports Gallery is a dialog that serves as the gateway to accessing and using the various report creation wizards. From the Report Gallery dialog, you can select from one of the four provided report wizards:

• Standard Used to create traditional columnar-styled reports.

• Cross-Tab Used to create summary styled cross-tab reports.

• Mail Labels Used to create reports with multiple columns, such as address labels.

• OLAP Used to create summary styled cross-tab reports that are based on an OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) data source.

Figure 4.1. The Crystal Reports Gallery dialog provides quick access to the various report creation wizards.

The remainder of this hour focuses on exploring and using the Standard Report Creation Wizard. In general, this is the most commonly used report wizard, and it provides a good introduction to the components of the report design process. However, if you are interested in learning more about the other wizards, an exercise on creating a cross-tab report using the Cross-Tab Wizard is provided in Hour 14, "Using Cross-Tabs for Summarized Reporting."

Crystal Reports 9 provides enhanced Cross-Tab and OLAP reporting capabilities as compared to the previous version. Crystal Reports 9 developers can perform more advanced summary-styled reporting against a variety of OLAP sources, including Microsoft's OLE DB provider for OLAP (such as SQL Server), IBM DB2 OLAP server, and Hyperion Essbase server. See Hour 14, and Hour 20, "Multidimensional Reporting Against OLAP Data," for further information.