Crystal Report Tutorials

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Crystal Reports Tutorials

Welcome to Crystal Report Tutorials. The objective of these tutorials is to provide an in-depth understanding of Crystal Report. In addition to free Crystal Report Tutorials, we will cover common interview questions, issues and how to’s of HTML.

What is Crystal Reports?

Crystal Report is a Reporting Application that can generate reports from various Data Sources like Databases, XML files etc.. The Visual Studio.NET Integrated Development Environment comes with Crystal Reports tools. The Crystal Reports makes it easy to create simple reports and also has comprehensive tools that you need to produce complex or specialized reports in csharp and other programming languages.

Crystal Reports is compatible with most popular development environments like C#, VB.NET etc. You can use the Crystal Reports Designer in Visual Studio .NET to create a new report or modify an existing report.

Crystal Reports Designer

The Crystal Reports Designer is an application which provides a graphical interface to develop reports and provides flexibility and control during the creation of highly formatted, feature-rich reports. It includes a complete and rich set of layout and design controls to give the created reports a professional, pixel-perfect appearance without any custom coding, streamline the number of reports by using parameters and organize data in a logical manner using sections, groups and sorting. The outlook of the ad-hoc chart and map reports is supported by the intelligent charting feature that automatically recommends the best chart type for a given set of data.

For novice users, Crystal Reports includes an intuitive report design expert and a report creation wizard. For more advanced users, Crystal Reports lets control over most features, including formulas, conditional formatting and object positioning so the reports can be highly customized.

Crystal Reports provides a set of over 35 data connection drivers to any relational, OLAP, XML or in-memory data source. CR provides native, ODBC, OLE DB or JDBC connectivity to databases, files, logs, enterprise applications, program elements or BusinessObjects Enterprise universes. The underlying SQL for every report developed in Crystal Reports can be customized which provides complete control over how the data is queried. It is also easy to link data from multiple sources and in multiple languages within the same report.

These core tutorials will help you to learn the Crystal Report Tutorials. For an in-depth understanding and practical experience,
  explore Crystal Reports Training.

Crystal Reports report designer is composed of the Toolbar, Design tab and Field Explorer and Report Explorer tabs. The toolbar is divided into Standard, Formatting, Insert, Experts, Navigation bars.

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Design tab provides an environment for designing a report. Data you want to place on the report is represented by fields that you put in sections of the report. In the Design tab you can also do formatting or specify sorting order and grouping.

Design tab basic sections:

  • Report Header
  • Page Header
  • Details
  • Report Footer
  • Page Footer

Click here to find more about Sections

Field Explorer is used to insert, modify or delete fields from the report. Database Fields folder consist of a list of database tables and columns you can retrieve data from. If you're not connected to the database, right-click on Database Fields folder and select Database Expert. In the Database Expert dialog box select connection to the database or create a new one. Select tables you want to use and click OK. Expand the Database Fields folder to see all available objects. To put the field on the report drag it and drop field frame on the report or select a field and use Insert Field button from the Field Explorer toolbar.

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You can switch from the Field Explorer tab to Report Explorer tab to manage sections of the report. To add Special Fields like page number, print date or comments expand Special Fields folder in the Field Expert tab. From the list of special fields choose the one you want to use and drag-and-drop it in the section where you want to place it.

To insert Text object select Insert Text Object from the Toolbar. Draw the text object frame in the section you want to place it. Fill the frame with a text. You can also put a picture on the report. To do this click Insert picture button from the Toolbar, browse for the picture you want to use and open it. Place the picture frame in a particular section.

To preview the report before printing it, use Print Preview on the Toolbar. Report preview will be generated. You can also preview the report in HTML format. To do this, click the HTML Preview button.

Benefits of Using Crystal Reports

  • Flexible and customized report − You can quickly create highly formatted, pixel-perfect reports using SAP Crystal Reports with high-level design interface and efficient workflows.
  • Powerful report delivery options − You can deliver personalized reports to your business end-users in their preferred language and format.
  • Data source connectivity − You can connect to information sources directly. Data sources include Native, ODBC, OLE DB, and JDBC connectivity to relational, OLAP, web services, XML, enterprise data sources, and salesforce.com.
  • Expanded support for Excel − You can take full advantage of the Excel file format by allowing more data to be exported to a single worksheet, without spanning multiple worksheets.
  • Windows operating system compatibility − SAP Crystal Reports software 2013 is certified compatible with Microsoft Windows 7.
  • Mobile compatibility − You can also open interactive reports through your mobile devices.
  • SAP Crystal Reports, Adobe Flash and HTML 5 integration − It enables SAP Crystal Reports developers to produce powerful "mash-ups" pulling data from various sources.
  • Competitors − SAP Crystal Reports competes with several products in the Microsoft markets like SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), XtraReports, ActiveReports, and List & Label.

Advantages of  Crystal Report

  • Rapid report development since the designer interface would ease the coding work programmer.
  • Can extend it to complicated reports with interactive charts and enhance the understanding of the business model.
  • Expose a report object model, can interact with other controls on the ASp.NET webform
  • can programmatically export the reports into widely used formats like pdf,.doc,.xls.html and .rtf

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