This Getting Started Guide provides a high-level overview of Seagate Crystal Reports^™ 8. This powerful tool makes designing, formatting and distributing presentation-quality reports simple. Its flexible design and analysis capabilities enable you to produce any report imaginable from virtually any database and distribute it in almost any format, including over the Web.

This Getting Started Guide contains enough information to get you up and running with Seagate Crystal Reports 8. Once you have completed this guide you’ll be capable of performing basic reporting tasks and may want to continue to experiment with the product on your own.

Seagate Crystal Reports 8 also provides powerful reporting capabilities for both application development and web-based reporting. Consult the comprehensive User’s Guide to learn more about how Seagate Crystal Reports can help everyone in your organization to access, analyze, report and share information that's important to them.

How Should I Use This Guide?

The best way to use this guide depends largely on your level of reporting experience. If you’re new to Seagate Crystal Reports or to reporting in general, the New Users section will explain some of the basic concepts of report creation with Seagate Crystal Reports and outline the areas in this guide to pay particular attention to. If you’re a Seagate Crystal Reports 7 user, the Existing Users section will also detail how Seagate Crystal Reports 8 differs from Version 7. Users of earlier versions of Seagate Crystal Reports will find the Previous Versions section helpful for catching up on all the new features that have been added throughout the releases.

New Users

If you’re new to Seagate Crystal Reports, you’ll find that it uses a "banded" report design structure. This is simply a logical way of breaking up the report into headers, footers, summary groups and detailed data.

Seagate Crystal Reports has powerful Report Experts to step you through common reporting tasks such as connecting to your data and selecting the information you want to report. The Report Experts can also help you to create some fairly complex reports. The numerous formatting features in Seagate Crystal Reports make it easy to create presentation-quality reports. 

If you’re a Microsoft^® Office 97 or 2000 user, you’ll discover how quickly you can create simple reports from within Microsoft Excel or Access using the new Add-ins. Reports created using the Add-ins can be saved and opened in Seagate Analysis for viewing or Seagate Crystal Reports for viewing and further editing.

To get an understanding of some of the reporting capabilities of Seagate Crystal Reports 8, read the Product Overview section and complete some of the Test Drive exercises. You should have no trouble working through these exercises, but if you need more information on Seagate Crystal Reports or report design in general, consult the online Help (from the Help menu in the Report Designer). Open some of the sample reports to get a better idea of the different types of reports that can be created with Seagate Crystal Reports and how they look in the Report Designer. You’ll find these sample reports under X:\ Program Files\Seagate Software\Crystal Reports\Samples\Reports (x being the install drive).

Existing Users

If you are using Seagate Crystal Reports 7, you will already be quite familiar with many of the reporting concepts and terminology used in this guide. You’ll notice, however, that the Report Designer interface has undergone some changes. For example, selecting your data source is done using the Data Explorer, which displays your data sources in an integrated tree-like directory to make connecting easier and faster. Some of the other features that are new or enhanced in Version 8 include the Add-ins for Microsoft Excel and Access, hyperlinks and Formula Editor. There are also significant enhancements to the Format Editor such as support for fractional font sizes, conditional font sizes, character and line spacing, indentation, and text rotation. As well, you can now select multiple objects, including lines, boxes, fields and text objects, and align, resize or move them all together.  

The Test Drive exercises will guide you through some of these new features and enhancements. The Reporting Tips will help you to create more efficient reports that enable you to share the right information with your readers. Open some of the sample reports that highlight some of the new features. You’ll find these sample reports under x:\ Program Files\Seagate Software\Crystal Reports\Samples\Reports (x being the install drive).

Previous Versions

If you’re a Version 5 or 6 user, you’ll notice that the Report Designer and most menus look slightly different from what you’re using now. The major visible differences are the addition of several new menu items and buttons, the Analyzer view for charts and maps, and several new Report Experts. You'll also notice a new look for parts of the user interface including the formula editor and report gallery.