Crystal Reports® 2008 For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Create a Simple Report Right Now!

In This Chapter

• Starting Crystal Reports

• Creating your first report

• Printing your report

• Troubleshooting your report

When you start Crystal Reports, you generally want to do one of three things:

• Create a report.

• 3 Modify a report.

• Run a report against the data in your database.

You use reports to take data from a database and then process, format, and finally output that data to a printer, computer screen, or Web site.

You probably chose Crystal Reports because you have a database that contains information that's important to you. In all likelihood, the data in that database changes with time, and you want to be able to keep up with its current status. Sure, you could retrieve the information you want by making SQL queries, but that would be too much like work. It's far better to create a report with Crystal Reports, and then run the report whenever you want the latest status of the information of interest. You need to create the report only once, and then you can run it many times, getting the latest results with each successive run. You don't have to learn SQL or any other method of pulling data from a database. Reports created with Crystal Reports are easy to build, easy to read, and easy to understand. What could be better?

Crystal Reports gives you tremendous freedom in how you can lay out your report. It also gives you great latitude in what you include in the report. In addition to text and columns of numbers, you can include graphical images, ...