Crystal Reports® 2008 For Dummies®

Chapter 9. Displaying Your Top Ten (Or Top N) with Group Sort

In This Chapter

• Sorting groups by performance rather than by name

• Selecting by percentage

• Sorting groups in reverse

• Troubleshooting problems with group sorts

An old saying in the sales business is that you get 80 percent of your sales from 20 percent of your customers. It's called the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule, and it's not restricted to sales. When doing the same work, some people or things are more productive than others. If you identify the most productive salespeople, machinery, or whatever, you can analyze the factors that make them so effective and perhaps apply what you learn to increase productivity overall.

In Chapter 6, I cover how to sort records and group them. A valuable extension of these capabilities is producing a report that shows only the top producers. In this chapter, you find out how to do just that.

Sorting Groups Based on Performance

In Chapter 6, I discuss the creation of a report for Xtreme Mountain Bikes that shows the dollar totals of individual sales orders, sorts the orders by customer name, groups records by state, and sorts the groups by state. That report, however, isn't very helpful to the Vice President of Sales, who is trying to get a feel for which customers are buying the most.

Adding drill-down capability to the report (as you can see in Chapter 6) shows which states are responsible for the most sales (on a percentage basis) but doesn't show which customers are the best. To get the ...