Crystal Reports® 2008 For Dummies®

Chapter 22. Displaying Reports Online

In This Chapter

• Exporting a report to a static HTML page

• Adding hyperlinks to your reports

• Routing reports on your intranet with Crystal Server

• Using a viewer to read a report

• Hosting your reports on crystalreports.com

• Integrating your reports with salesforce.com

As organizations become more interconnected electronically, an emerging trend is to communicate more over the network than by passing around paper. In many cases, organizational intranets have become the communications medium of choice. Beyond the organization's borders, extranets and the Internet have assumed more important roles. Crystal Reports takes advantage of this trend. Report features, such as drill down and subreports, require the report reader to be online. It's not hard to drill down into a sheet of paper, but when you do, you don't see very much, and it tends to ruin the surface of your desk.

In this chapter, I discuss the various electronic means of distributing reports. The reports are distributed and accessed using a variety of tools. One of these ways, I mentioned briefly in Chapter 21, namely exporting to a static HTML page, visible on a local area network, a wide area network, or around the world on the World Wide Web. One of the really handy features of HTML is that it enables you to navigate from one page to another using hyperlinks. Here I describe how to add hyperlinks to a Crystal report. A brand new way to distribute reports is to make use of the crystalreports.com ...