Introduction

Introduction
Mastering Crystal Reports 9
by Cate McCoy and Gord Maric
Sybex 2003

We’re drowning in information and starving for knowledge.

—Rutherford D. Rogers

Every fan of comedy recalls with a smile the classic “Who’s on first?” routine performed so well by Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. The comical confusion caused by ineffective communication of information between the two comedians can bring on a good belly laugh as you watch them try to make sense of the words they’re sharing. This sense of comedy surrounding information sharing, however, may leave you shaking your head in despair instead of smiling if it involves the communication of information in your organization.

Have you ever been handed an assignment and told simply that you needed to “get the bottom line” for the boss but were given no idea on where the data that makes up that bottom line is stored, how to retrieve it, and how to synthesize the raw data in a way that represents a meaningful bottom line? Your boss might as well have been Bud Abbott and you the hapless Lou Costello trying desperately to fulfill a communication request but having very little help. This book is the help you need. It teaches Crystal Reports in great detail—entirely from a problem-solving perspective. You’ll come away not only knowing the in and outs of the software, but more important, how to use its features and tools to provide real-world reporting solutions. In other words, when someone in your organization hands you an end-result request, you’ll know how to retrieve the necessary data and produce an attractive report that conveys information people can use.

Crystal Reports is THE (yes, in capital letters) tool you need to help you get to your raw data, retrieve it, massage it, and present it in a way that answers business questions for people who need those answers. It may be you, the jack-of-all-trades, who needs the answers. You are master of the data and the techniques required to convert that data to solid information. Or perhaps it’s a colleague, a boss, a business partner, or a customer who needs the information. They come to you with a business question, and your job is to provide an answer using that information. You are the middle man or middle woman, and Crystal Reports is the tool in your toolbox that helps you take the data from its murky storage location and present it in full light as an informational report.

This book is for you, the Crystal Reports developer. Use it to help create accurate, complete business answers to business questions using your organization’s data.

Who Should Read This Book?

The book is arranged in a way that allows beginning Crystal Reports users and business people who rely on their data to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” to learn the product in a fun and easy way. This book begins where every good story should—at the beginning. We start with fundamental Crystal Reports 9 techniques and show you how to put easy-to-use features to work to retrieve, format, and synthesize data, transforming it into information.

Next, we move on to the fancy stuff by showing you how to incorporate graphics and grids and fine-tune performance-enhancing options. We then introduce intermediate skills to move you to the next skill level by explaining complex concepts in a straightforward manner so that you can really transform your data into knowledge.

Finally, we approach Crystal Reports from the perspective of a programmer to teach you how to use it as a platform for developing custom applications, including web services. Application developers new to Crystal will find information you need to know to integrate Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise into your Visual Basic, Visual Studio .NET, ASP, and Java programming environments.

The progression of topics is intended to get you going quickly with the basic features and move you forward just as quickly into the advanced areas of the software. The sections and chapters are laid in a way that allows you to jump to the area that you need at any given moment.

Use of content on this site is expressly subject to the restrictions set forth in the Membership Agreement

Conello © 2000-2003     Feedback