Making Presentation-Quality Reports

Up to this point in the book, the focus of the hours has been on making sure that the retrieved and presented data is manipulated and appears as required. That is the most important step for report development. However, the next step, formatting, will keep the users coming back to the reports time and time again.

By making reports that are friendly to the business users and easy to read, users will have a good experience with the reports and will come back often for updates and to share the reports with others.

Presentation quality reporting is accomplished using formatting in Crystal Reports. Formatting can take many different forms, from basic font coloring to hyperlinks to conditional formatting (based on the data coming back from the database). This hour examines a cross-section of all these types of formatting to give the report developer a good basis for report formatting.

Because formatting is a visual element of the report, this hour will be a series of tutorials to allow you to actually add formatting to a report started in an earlier hour. Lets assume that the Xtreme Mountain Bike Company would like the report that was started in Hour 5, "Fundamentals of Report Creation and Design," to be improved upon by adding some formatting.