| After the requirements for creating a Crystal Report have been determined, the actual report can be designed. This involves mapping the gathered business user requirements to the technologies available within the Crystal Reports design application. Using the Crystal Reports Design Framework With years of experience in producing reporting software, Crystal Decisions has built Crystal Reports around a design framework, intended to organize reports in a logical manner. Those framework items include Tables/Links Grouping Summaries Formulas Parameters Text objects Special fields Special formatting The above items might look familiar because many of them are options in the Report Design Wizard, covered in Hour 4. An order of precedence can be applied to each of these tasks to get a report up and running as quickly as possible. Basic Items Used to Create a Report No two reports look alike, nor are they designed in the same way. However, some basic report features must always be present: Tables/Links This is the foundation for your reports. If you need to report on data that resides in multiple database tables (Orders and Customer), without the links to make them work properly together, you will not be able to successfully complete a report. Groups These will be the logical breaking points to support your story. Details Putting the data on the report that will be needed to calculate and tell the rest of the story. These are the records of the report. Summaries To make the details more useful, summarizing them into the basic facts that the business user is looking for is key. There should be no need to grab a calculator or open up Excel to get the numbers. Subtotals and Summaries in Crystal Reports can handle that for you. Additional Report Components Beyond these features, Crystal Reports offers major benefits that will enhance the report viewing experience for the business end user: Parameters These are rich business user-focused features that will allow the report consumer to make the reports act differently depending on the user's input. For more information on parameters, check out Hour 12, where this is explained further. Formulas Selection formulas, data manipulation, and complex calculations can be handled with formulas. We will look more closely at selection formulas in Hour 12. Sort Order Ascending and descending order are the most common for reporting, but they are not the only options. You could sort based on group contents. For more information on sorting, see Hour 7. Formatting/Pictures/Hyperlinks/Charts/Maps These are the items that really make the report grab the business users' attention of the. The cool visualizations make it presentable and flashy! Now that you know what the requirements are for the sales management report, as well as some high-level features of what Crystal Reports offers, let's begin designing the report. |
