Hour 10. Understanding and Implementing Formulas

In Hour 6, "Selecting and Grouping Data," we briefly introduced formulas the ability to create them and subsequently drop them into a report from the Field Explorer. In this hour, we'll explore the Formula Editor in more detail.

Formulas provide great flexibility and power when creating Crystal Reports by enabling the creation of derived fields not directly stored in available data sources. Formulas also enable the creation of advanced conditional object formatting and the use of flexible selection formulas in a report.

Crystal Reports has a number of built-in tools that facilitate the formula creation and formula reuse processes, the Formula Editor being a good example. With version 9, a powerful new tool called the Formula Workshop has been added to Crystal Reports. The Formula Workshop provides a single convenient access point to almost all of your formula fields within a given report. SQL Expression fields, Record and Group Selection formulas, Formatting formulas and Custom Report and Repository based functions can all be accessed from the new Formula Workshop.

In this hour, the following topics are covered:

  • An introduction to the Formula Workshop

  • A review of the Formula Workshop Tree Elements

  • Formula Editor

  • Arithmetic, Date, and String formulas

  • Type conversion

  • Variables in formulas

  • Formula Expert

  • Formula Extractor



Sams Teach Yourself Crystal Reports 9 in 24 Hours
Sams Teach Yourself Crystal Reports 9 in 24 Hours
ISBN: B003D7JUVW
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 230

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