Introduction

To this point, the majority of material you've seen in this book focused on the various functions of the Crystal Reports design application. Equally important, however, is the form (or format) of the reportespecially when a report is used as a corporate or industry-standard document that projects a company's image externally (such as an income statement or balance sheet). This chapter focuses on form over function and discusses a myriad of formatting techniques.

You have already reviewed the Crystal Reports XI development environment and learned about creating a report from a blank canvas, as well as how to select, group, filter, sort, and summarize your report data. Now, you move on to the cosmetic aspects of report design. Working with report formatting and object properties to create professionally designed reports is very straightforward, but does require familiarity with various features of the design-application environment. This chapter reviews the most commonly used object formatting techniquesfonts, borders, page and margin properties, and object layeringand also provides a tutorial to apply these techniques to one of the sample reports created earlier in the book.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• Positioning and sizing report objects

• Modifying object properties for formatting purposes

• Combining and layering report objects

• Configuring report page and margin properties