Summary

In this hour, you have started working with report formatting and object properties to create professionally designed reports. Formatting reports in Crystal Reports 9 is a very straightforward and intuitive process, but requires some familiarity with various features of the design application environment, such as using font, border, object layering, page, and margin settings. You have now reviewed many of the techniques required to apply a variety of formatting specifications to your reports, and you have accomplished this quickly through the use of dialogs, menu commands, and toolbar buttons all just a few mouse clicks away from having meaningful information in the hands of those who need it.

As a result of following the exercises in this hour, you have constructed a very useful report that displays all the customer contacts, with telephone and email information, for the Xtreme Mountain Bike Company. You have structured this report to group the customers logically into their respective countries and formatted the font styles of the country description, report title, column titles, and email address field to make for a more precise presentation of the report information. By combining the Country database field with a text field, you have also provided for a bilingual display of the country description.