Chapter 12: Creating Charts

Overview

Crystal Reports 10 continues the tradition of a rich charting capability. This complements Crystal Reports complete formatting capabilities for textual information. Not only can you create attractive, meaningful text-based reports, you can present the information graphically as well. Using Crystal Reports charting and graphing capabilities, you can see your database data presented in colorful bar charts, pie charts, three-dimensional area charts, and in many other ways (one additional chart type has been added to version 10). These charts can be seen in the Preview tab right inside Crystal Reports, on web reports, included in reports exported to other external file formats, or printed on a black-and-white or color printer.

There are some very fundamental questions you should initially ask before you add a chart to a report. Either you or your reporting audience should answer these questions satisfactorily before you proceed:

• Will my viewers really benefit from a graphical representation of the data?

• What kind of chart best matches the information to be shown?

While it s tempting to load up reports with lots of pretty, colorful charts, they aren t always an appropriate way to get across the message of the report. But for the many instances when a chart will add value to a report, you have a great number of charting options available to you.