Summary

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

As you’ve seen in this chapter, creating a report with Crystal Reports is easy. Creating a good report, however, requires that you understand how to connect to the data, retrieve the pieces you need, and lay them out in an aesthetically pleasing and meaningful way. A solid understanding of your report-writing tool is essential.

The five basic sections, or bands, of a Crystal Report play a large role in the ultimate look, feel, and behavior of a report. The report wizard places fields and text automatically in appropriate sections, and with a little background information on why the wizard does what it does, you can confidently move data around to make the layout work for you. The Standard Report Creation Wizard helps you perform summarization and grouping during the first stages of report writing, which is where you start the process of converting raw data into meaningful information.

Beyond the wizard approach to building a report, you can add visual elements to a report, which can go a long way in delivering quality reporting. While you can’t change the news the data delivers, sometimes the news is easier to swallow if it at least looks organized and neat in the report! We’ll continue working with this report in the next chapter as we move beyond the Report Creation Wizard to additional Crystal Report features.

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