Making Presentation-Quality Reports

Up to this point in the book, the focus of the chapters has been on making sure that the data appears as required. The next step, formatting, keeps users coming back to the reports time and time again. When we talk about formatting, users often assume we're simply making a report "pretty" or "boardroom quality" and this simply isn't the case. With rich formatting, the data should be easier to read, understand, and navigate. Rich formatting should guide the reader's eye to those elements of the report that are most important and in the case of reports that mimic paper documents, your Crystal Report can be made to look identical to the original documentadoption of your new report should be very impressive.

Formatting can take many different forms, from basic font coloring to hyperlinks to conditional formatting (formatting that is based on the data). This chapter examines a cross-section of all these types of formatting to give the report author a good basis for report formatting.

This chapter presents a series of tutorials to enable you to add formatting to a report started in an earlier chapter. Let's assume that you would like to improve the report that was started in Chapter 6, "Fundamentals of Report Formatting."