Documenting Reports

If you distribute reports to others, it’s important that your audience understands the purpose of the report so that there is some context to the information they’re receiving. You can document important information such as the report author’s name, title and description of the report in the Summary Info section under the File menu. You can also point readers to documents or web sites containing further information by adding hyperlinks to the report header or footer.

Organizing your Data

The goal of most report designers is to provide well-organized information, not just raw data, to their audience. Try to ensure that your readers see, at first glance, the major elements or groupings in the report that communicate key information. To accomplish this, many report designers use a summary format so that the larger pieces of information, such as sales for a company or expenses by department, are available on the first page. Readers of the reports can then drill-down into that information to probe for details, such as why costs are so high or sales are so low. Organizing your data in this manner makes your reports much more readable, especially if your audience is large and interested in viewing only specific areas of a report. Navigating from large summarized groupings to detailed information is easier than starting at the detail level.

Adding Visual Elements

Some of the most important elements of any report are charts, colors and layout styles, which help direct your audience to certain points of interest in your report. Charts and maps added at multiple levels can help readers comprehend the data, and are particularly effective for highlighting trends and deviant data values.

Another powerful feature within Seagate Crystal Reports is the ability to highlight data based on a value. For example, if sales drop below a certain value, then you can flag this in red. Taking this further, you can show additional details on the report if a specific value warrants it. For example, if manufacturing units fall below 10,000 units per hour, display an additional header section on the report showing the details for the product and the production by plant. Color coding the information makes the report "smarter" and reduces the amount of data that users have to sift through to get a picture of what is going on.

Customizing your Reports

Thousands of users often need similar information in a timely manner. A great way to give your audience more control over the information they receive is to include a series of parameters on the report. When you add parameter fields, Seagate Crystal Reports asks your reader which records to include or exclude when they refresh the report. For example, in a general expense listing report, you can prompt a department manager for the department number, a date range, the employee or sub-department and maybe even whether they want to view a help section in the report. They enter the criteria and receive only the information for the specified department, sub-department and date range. Adding parameters puts more power into the hands of the user and reduces the traffic on the network. 

Choosing Appropriate Report Styles

You can choose from a variety of report styles to create mailing labels, letters, forms, subreports, cross-tab, conditional and standard reports. Your selection of report style should reflect the purpose of the report, the data and your audience. 

Plan the design of your report on paper, including the group levels and sorting tasks, before you begin the report creation process. Thinking about the information you need to present and how you want to present it helps you select the most appropriate report style. If you think you need more than one report style to provide a complete and accurate picture of the information, use the subreport feature to link two or more reports together to provide two different views of the data. For example, to communicate costs versus revenue to your readers, you could use a columnar report to show the revenues grouped by region as a master report, and make links to a cost report at the regional level. The cross-tab style for your cost report enables you to display rows of projects and columns showing the week the expenses hit the books.

Keeping Reports Lean

Reports often need to be accessed and processed by a large number of users so it is crucial to design them with efficiency in mind. Reports that have too many linked subreports, or that are not performing record selections on indexed fields when they could be, take many times longer to process. This can also increase the traffic on your company’s network and database systems. The following hints will help keep your reports lean:

• When designing reports against large databases you can refresh against a specific number of records by selecting File | Print | Preview Sample. Selecting fewer records speeds up the report creation process.  
• Seagate Crystal Reports is "printer dependant", which means that it lays out your report using information gathered by polling your printer driver for font information, margins and other settings. Remember that reports printed on two different printers may not look exactly the same.  
  
  
• To make a report look as good on paper as it does on screen, use the specific formatting techniques found in the Options dialog box from the File menu. For example, you can stretch fields and objects to the width of the page or align fields or objects to the center, left, or right. As well, you can use the snap-to grid options and guidelines to align all the fields.  
  
  
• If you do not plan to print your report, design it with the No Printer option enabled in the Printer Setup dialog box in the File menu.  
  
  
• Never reference a formula within another formula as this slows the report generation time. You can use variables instead - when you assign a value to a variable it holds this value until another value is assigned to it. You can reference variables within any formula by re-declaring the variable.

For example:
Formula 1
WhileReadingRecords;
NumberVar X;
X := 5 + 5
The result is that X = 10 and if it is placed on the report will display "10".  

Formula 2 
NumberVar X; 
X + 20 
If it is placed on the report in a section that comes AFTER the first formula, the result will be "30".

Remember that the formula that references the variable must be processed after the formula that assigns the value.