Chapter 8 - Advanced Formatting Techniques
Once you've mastered the basics of creating reports, it's time to learn some of the finer points of report design. Crystal Reports gives you numerous formatting options for printing report sections for specialized purposes. For example, you can create specialized reports such as labels or multi-column reports. You also have the option of creating multiple sections within a report and format each section individually. This one feature gives you an almost unlimited number of ways to make a report fit different scenarios and customize it for individual users. The first part of this chapter covers how to format Sections to create professional reports for any circumstance. You are given lots of creative examples of how to use Sections in real world reports.
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Crystal Report Templates
Report templates make it easy to create reports that all have common formatting. This can save you a considerable amount of time because you don't have to format the objects on a report individually. The template formats all the objects at one time.Report templates work by examing how the report objects in a template are formatted and applying those same formatting rules to an existing report. The formatting properties of the existing report are overridden by the template and the report takes on the appearance of the template. Report templates make it easy to give your reports a consistent look and feel.
You've already seen how Crystal Reports makes it easy to create reports that use consistent formatting. The Options dialog box has a Fields tab and Font tab that sets the default formatting of each type of report object. For example, you can set Field objects to be Arial with a size 10 and you can set String objects to have a thin border. Every string object added to the reports takes on that formatting. But this has its limitations because report formatting is a much more granular process. Strings can be formatted one way in a group header, and have a totally different formatting in the details sections The Options dialog box is too generic to take this into account. It gives you a good start and saves you a little time, but there is still work to be done to make the report look polished. Another limitation is that Options dialog box doesn't take into account the positioning of objects on a page and more global aspects of a report, like having a corporate logo at the top and formatting page numbers a certain way at the bottom of a page. Templates make up for the short-comings of the Options dialog box.
You've already had a brief introduction to templates when using the Report Wizard. The final step of the Report Wizard lets you select the report template for applying default formatting. Crystal Reports installs a set of default report templates to give you a head start on formatting your reports.
You aren't limited to using the report templates that are installed with Crystal Reports. You can use an existing report as a template or you can create custom templates as well. Creating custom templates lets you specify graphics and color schemes that display the logo and match the corporate image. We'll talk more about custom templates in a later section.
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