Crystal Reports XI: Beginner Tutorials
Designing a Basic Report / Layout & Presentation
Subtitles of the Movie (Crystal Reports XI: Beginner / Designing a Basic Report / Layout & Presentation)
In this movie we're going to deal with Layout and Presentation. Go ahead and open Report1 if you haven't already. This is the report that we point at the Employee Table of our Test Database. Go ahead and click on the Preview tab if not already there. I want you to notice, after going through the Report Wizard we do have our data, it is ordered but it's kind of disjointed, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. We do have some Headers, but the data isn't what I'd consider in readable format. This is where Crystal Report's tools for layout and presentation take over. Go ahead and click on the Design tab. The Design tab is where we're going to layout our fields and where we want them to appear. Not only that we can change groups, change order, even move anything around on the screen that we want. Crystal has a simple drag and drop functionality, which means that I can click on any field and move it where I want it to go. To help you in your layout efforts, Crystal provides Guidelines. The Guidelines are these here, these small little boxes with points, that produce this grayed out dotted line down here. This allows us to drag a field close to that line, release, and it automatically lines that object with that Guideline. Notice how the left-hand side of this object is now red. That tells you that the object has been lined up with your Guidelines. Now these Guidelines aren't fixed in space. You can move them, and notice how those fields move with you. You can also move them back. You can also remove them altogether. Go ahead and hit Control Z. The other beautiful thing about Crystal is, like all Windows programs, you have an Undo button. You can either hold down Control and Z to Undo the last moves, or you can do it through the Edit Menu. Undo and Redo. Like most Windows programs, once you've saved it erases the Undo Menu and the last moves that you made, so if you're going to undo something, make sure you do it before you save. Another feature of Crystal is that I can highlight more than one object, like so, hold down the mouse button and drag the mouse, and notice it starts creating an outline box. As long as my outline box touches the objects on the screen and I release, it'll highlight all of those objects. From there I can move these up, down, left, right, wherever I see fit. You can also delete these objects, format these objects, and do any number of things. I like to point out something here as well with the Guidelines. You have Guidelines that go from top to bottom and from left to right. If you look at your Type field, here, notice how the left-hand side of this box has red highlights and the bottom side of this object has red highlights. That means it's lined up with this Guideline top to bottom and this Guideline left to right. Now, remember at any time you can delete fields as you see fit by simply highlighting and pressing the Delete key. You can also highlight it, right-click, and tell it to Cut, Copy, or Delete a given field. You can also remove these Guidelines if you don't find them useful by putting your mouse over the box, clicking, holding down the mouse, and moving the mouse off the design workspace. You can also change the Group. In the previous lesson we covered Report Headers, Page Headers, Group Headers, Details. These are all sections of a report. This is how they display on the Preview tab. You can make these as large or as small as needed. Put your mouse on the line that is the bottom of the page header. It turns into a double arrow pointing up and down. Hold your mouse button down and drag up. You've now shrunken your section. You also have a whole host of menu items on these sections. For example, you can right-click on Group Header 1 and you can either Hide, Suppress, Go to Section Expert, you can Change the Group, but for our purposes, let's go ahead and Suppress. As you can see, this section is grayed out. What that means is, when you hit Preview you won't see it. Go ahead and click Preview, to show you what I mean. Before we had a Group Header visible and now we do not. Go back to Design tab. Go ahead and click on the Group Footer 1, and also Suppress, and hit Preview. As you can see, our report has changed greatly. We no longer have these Group sections disjointing the data. We now have a very clean list, organized by EmployeeID, which was our first group. You don't need a group to sort, you can also sort them without groups; it really depends on the type of reports you're using. From this lesson, you know you can move the fields where you need them to be using or not using the Guidelines. It's really up to you. I know some people who are wizards at manually placing objects where they want and they come out very clean. You'll have to decide as you move along.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Crystal Reports XI: Beginner |
| Author: | Kurt Dunlap |
| SKU: | 33966 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-29-7 |
| Release Date: | 2009-02-10 |
| Duration: | 6.5 hrs / 95 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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