Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie we're going to cover your Export Options in Crystal. Using Report2, our test report that we've been developing these past few lessons, go ahead and take the mouse and find the envelope with the arrow pointing down Icon, that's the Export Icon. This brings up our Export Window. From here we get to choose the Format and the Destination we like. Also notice you get a nice little description of what each one does. The formats available are directly related to the ones you had installed when Crystal XI was installed on your machine. If I hit the drop-down box I can see everything that's available to me. I get everything from PDF to HTML to Microsoft Excel, to Text, to XML. Now our report is not exactly pretty yet, but you can still export it to any one of these things as you see fit. One of the most common is the Microsoft and PDF formats. But let's focus on the Microsoft Excel. The first option, the one that's Microsoft Excel 97 through 2000 is Crystal's attempt to export the report exactly as you see it on the screen but in Excel. What that means for you is you're going to have lots of merge cells, and extra columns, and things might be a little bit out of whack. Your other option, of course, is to choose Data only, and what this does is it tries to strip away most of the formatting and just kind of line it up in neat columns and rows. Let's demonstrate. We're going to try the first option, the Excel 97-2000 without the Data only, choose this. Our Destination is going to be a Disk File, and we'll get to choose exactly where in a moment. These are the options that come with the choice that we had. In this part we're going to leave it alone and press OK, and I'm going to choose Desktop, and I'm going to call this Report2Excel NonDataOnly and hit Save. If I go to my Desktop and then launch this report notice how Crystal has tried to emulate what was on the screen before. Sometimes it's successful, sometimes not so much. As you notice we've got some extra columns and cells here, and a few extra lines inserted. Now, let's see what happens when we do Data only and press OK. You get a few more options. You can try and Export Object Formatting, but again, it's going to try and line it up for you as it sees fit. You can also decide, more or less your column width by basing it on the objects in the Report Header, the Page Header, Group Header 1, Group Header 2, Group Footer, so on and so forth. For our point, we're going to leave it alone and press OK. We'll call this Report2 excel data only and hit Save. Now if I go to my Desktop and launch the data only file I get something that's not as pretty but essentially lined up in columns and rows. This is often a good one if you're doing detailed analysis and you don't want to spend a whole lot of time formatting in Excel. The other option that's available to you, if we click on the Export Icon again, is Microsoft Word, and press OK. You can choose the page ranges, just like you were exporting -Ðpress OK, and let's go ahead and choose our Desktop and we'll call it Report2doc. Go ahead and hit Save. If I go to my Desktop and choose Report2doc I get a Microsoft Word doc where it tried to line up everything exactly as I see it. As you can see, Crystal has a lot of Export options. They only kind of make sense, of course, if you formatted a report. Our report's very rough right now, but with a little bit of work we can actually get it to mold with Word, Excel or whatever we happen to be looking to export to.