Chapter 1: Building Your First Report | Mastering Crystal Reports 9

Chapter 1 - Building Your First Report
Mastering Crystal Reports 9
by Cate McCoy and Gord Maric
Sybex 2003

Overview

Every business that stores data has a need to retrieve that data and build good reports. Organizations don’t typically store data without reason…business intelligence (BI) is the reason, and reporting is the process of creating that business intelligence.

The process begins with locating the stored data. Sometimes this is an easy task; sometimes it is not. Crystal Reports can help you easily connect to your data. The next part of the task is to identify and format the pieces of data you need to answer a business question. A data customer will never come to you and say, “Hey, can you build a report with five fields, a graph, and a title?” Instead, they’ll ask you if you can build a report to answer a business question, for instance, “How many five-star resorts do we have in our inventory?” The focus for users of data is on the business intelligence it provides, not on the data itself.

This makes your job similar to that of a good detective. You piece together all the clues using data and tell your audience at the end of the process “whodunit” using summary information and visual elements. Your job as the report designer is to convert business requests into the nuts and bolts of a report.

Featured in this chapter:

Using a wizard to choose a report gallery style
Choosing a data source
Adding and formatting fields
Grouping information
Sorting information
Adding summary information
Understanding the report design area
Using the toolbars and menus


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