Hour 1. The Value of Crystal Reports 9

Crystal Reports is a design application for creating powerful and compelling reports that transform data, from virtually any data source, into meaningful information. Hundreds of thousands of business users and application developers alike have discovered the power and flexibility of Crystal Reports. Not just a tool for application developers, Crystal Reports is also an application for a wide variety of organizational users who need to analyze and interpret important information for better presentation and decision making. Many corporate business users get their information from a variety of legacy mechanisms that are still prevalent today custom applications, mainframe reports, ASCII files, and so on. But, these mechanisms do very little to maximize the investment that organizations often make in their corporate Information Technology systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and other critical data systems.

Considered to be the world standard for report writing, Crystal Reports has more than seven million licenses distributed worldwide. A contributing factor to this great success is that Crystal Reports is packaged within some of the most predominant software solutions in the world, including Microsoft's .NET platform, SAP, PeopleSoft, and others. As a result, users of these best-in-class solutions also benefit from the tightly integrated and highly powerful Crystal Reports technology. Partnerships such as these are perhaps the biggest endorsement any particular software product could hope for. Figure 1.1 shows an example of a Balance Sheet report created using Crystal Reports.

Figure 1.1. A sample Balance Sheet report created using Crystal Reports.

The proliferation of Crystal Reports as the most common reporting application in the world is in large part because of its intuitive design environment that enables beginners to create simple reports, as well as its capability of empowering more experienced users to design sophisticated reports to satisfy more complex requirements. This hour introduces the concepts of report design and the components of Crystal Reports that aid in the planning and creation of reports. The hour will also cover many of the new features made available in this latest release of Crystal Reports (version 9.0).

In this hour, the following topics are covered:

• Transforming data into information with Crystal Reports

• Key benefits of the Crystal Reports application

• Crystal Reports as a Content Creation application

• New features and enhancements in Crystal Reports 9