Summary

You should now understand the value of Crystal Reports as a design application for creating powerful and compelling reports that transform data, from virtually any data source, into meaningful information. Crystal Reports is used by hundreds of thousands of business users and application developers to service a wide array of reporting demands. Crystal Reports is widely accepted as the de facto reporting application in the market and can complement any corporate business and technology environment that requires reporting from custom applications to mainframe reports, ASCII files, and so on to maximize the investment that organizations make in their corporate Information Technology systems.

The proliferation of Crystal Reports is in large part because of its intuitive design environment that enables beginners to create simple reports, as well as empowering more experienced users to design sophisticated reports to satisfy more complex requirements. This hour has introduced the concepts of report design and the components of Crystal Reports that aid in planning and creating reports. The latest release of Crystal Reports, already considered to be the world standard for reporting, now offers even greater productivity, usability, power, and flexibility for report designers to deliver information. Whether you are creating reports for yourself or supporting an entire organization's information demands, Crystal Reports can service your report design requirements. We will now move into how you can get started using the Crystal Reports application in the next hour, "Getting Started with Crystal Reports 9."