Using Report Templates | Designing Effective Report Templates

Table of contents:

How Are Templates Better Than Styles in Older Versions?

Think of a template as the form that everyone in a company must comply to. Templates can house many types of objects. These objects can be applied to a report after the data-intensive portion of the report design is completed. Applying an existing template to a report can save hours or potentially days of mundane formatting tasks.

Some types of tasks that can be accomplished by (but are not limited to) applying a template to a report are as follows:

Corporate logos and other images
Consistent page numbering formatting
Font style/color/typeface for data fields
Field border and background formatting
Field sizing
Group headers and footers formatting
Summary field formatting
Watermarks
Tricky formatting
Lines
Boxes
Repository objects
Report titles
Web site links
Formatting based on data-field type

How Are Templates Better Than Styles in Older Versions?

Templates are better than the Styles in older versions of Crystal Reports in so many ways that it's challenging to explain in a short section. However, because not all report designers have used Crystal Reports prior to version 10, they won't know how cumbersome styles used to be. For those of you new to Crystal Reports 10, feel free to skip this sidebar.

The main problem with the old Report Styles feature in older versions of Crystal Reports (such as 8.5) was that they were not customizable. The styles that one person created when the feature was initially introduced were the only options available. Even if you just didn't like the color red as the group name field and wanted to change it to blue, you were not able to, which was very limiting. This limitation alone made the Styles feature practically useless outside of learning how to create very simple reports.

These styles were also limited to data and group fields. No images or static text objects were included, and again because the styles could not be modified, they could not be updated in this way. The styles were hard-coded into the Crystal Reports designer so that no external .rpt files were used, whereas Templates enable the use of any .rpt file.

Part I. Crystal Reports Design

Creating and Designing Basic Reports

Selecting and Grouping Data

Filtering, Sorting, and Summarizing Data

Understanding and Implementing Formulas

Implementing Parameters for Dynamic Reporting

Part II. Formatting Crystal Reports

Fundamentals of Report Formatting

Working with Report Sections

Visualizing Your Data with Charts and Maps

Custom Formatting Techniques

Part III. Advanced Crystal Reports Design

Using Cross-Tabs for Summarized Reporting

Using Record Selections and Alerts for Interactive Reporting

Using Subreports and Multi-Pass Reporting

Using Formulas and Custom Functions

Designing Effective Report Templates

Additional Data Sources for Crystal Reports

Multidimensional Reporting Against OLAP Data with Crystal Reports

Part IV. Enterprise Report Design Analytic, Web-based, and Excel Report Design

Introduction to Crystal Repository

Crystal Reports Semantic Layer Business Views

Creating Crystal Analysis Reports

Advanced Crystal Analysis Report Design

Ad-Hoc Application and Excel Plug-in for Ad-Hoc and Analytic Reporting

Part V. Web Report Distribution Using Crystal Enterprise

Introduction to Crystal Enterprise

Using Crystal Enterprise with Web Desktop

Crystal Enterprise Architecture

Planning Considerations When Deploying Crystal Enterprise

Deploying Crystal Enterprise in a Complex Network Environment

Administering and Configuring Crystal Enterprise

Part VI. Customized Report Distribution Using Crystal Reports Components

Java Reporting Components

Crystal Reports .NET Components

COM Reporting Components

Part VII. Customized Report Distribution Using Crystal Enterprise Embedded Edition

Part VII. Customized Report Distribution Using Crystal Enterprise Embedded Edition