Crystal Reports XI: Beginner Tutorials
Designing a Basic Report / Previewing & Exporting Reports
Subtitles of the Movie (Crystal Reports XI: Beginner / Designing a Basic Report / Previewing & Exporting Reports)
In this movie we're going to talk about Previewing and Exporting the report. Well, we've now taken our Employee Table Report, which is what I'd like to call a simple list report, laid it out on the screen that we need to see it, and placed the Headers where we need them to be and put the Order that we need to see. Now the next logical step is, now that we've done everything we can, is to share that information. Now, previewing you pretty much already have. Every time you click on the Preview tab you get a what-you-see-is-what-you-get type of format. What we're going to do is, we're going to export it into some sample formats for you. Go ahead and take your mouse and click on the Export Icon, which is the envelope with the down-pointing arrow. Go ahead and click on that. This brings up our Export Window. From here we have to choose a Format and a Destination. What's handy about Crystal Reports XI is it now gives a nice little description of the type of format that you choose. Like, for example PDF. Crystal gives a nice little description of what that format is. Destination is also important. You could go ahead and click down on the Destination. You can choose to send this to an Application, an Exchange Folder, Lotus Domino, Lotus Mail, and Mapping. These are all choices that we picked on install. In this case we're going to leave it as a Disk File. Disk File just simply refers to a location on your hard drive or network. Go ahead and press OK. And based on the options you choose you have some more options that you can specify. In the case of PDF your ranges are All, or you can say Page Range, give me Page 1 to 1, or 1 to 10, or 1 to 3, depending on how many pages you actually have. These pages will mirror the pages that you see in the Preview of your Crystal Report. You can also create Bookmarks from a Group Tree, but we'll get into that a little bit later. For now, let's press All and press OK. The last window that you're going to see is what file name you want this PDF to have, and where you want it to go. You can Browse and choose hmm, Desktop, and I'm going to call it Report1 PDF. I don't have to put the extension. pdf because it'll do it for me. Go ahead and press Save. Depending on how large the report is you might get a window telling you the progress of how many records it's exported. If I minimize my Crystal Report and go to my Desktop I now have a PDF that I can open with Acrobat Reader, or Photoshop or any program that can make sense of a. pdf file. If I go back to my Crystal Reports let's try another format. This time something pretty common, Excel. Notice all the options that come with your Export. These, again, are set up when you install Crystal Reports XI. Your needs may be different but they come with pretty much under the sun. In the case of Excel you have two versions. You have a Microsoft 97 through 2000 XLS and the same thing but Data Only. For our purposes let's go ahead and choose Data Only and again we're going to choose the same Disk File and press OK. From here you have some Excel format options, which are different from your PDF options. You can choose your Excel Format, your Typical, your Minimal, or your Custom. If you're going to go custom you want to click on your Options button and this expands the window and gives you all the options available to you. You can choose your column width based in the objects on the Detail section, the Report Header, the Page Header, the Footer. If you have Group sections they'll also appear as options to choose from as well. You can also specify Constant Column Width in points in Excel. In our case we're going to leave it there. You can also choose to Export your object formatting or any images you may have. The Use Worksheet Function for Summary can be kind of tricky depending on how complicated your summaries are. Sometimes the translation from Crystal to Excel isn't the best, although in Crystal XI they have pretty much taken care of almost every summary function and it translates very well to Excel. You can also choose to Maintain relative object position, meaning you're trying to get your report to look exactly as it looks on your screen. The problem here is Excel is kind of cell-based, so Crystal needs to find where everything needs to go in its cell. If you are going to use Crystal Reports to Excel one word of advice: I would highly suggest that you spend a lot of time in your Detail and Layout section making sure everything is lined up perfectly nice. That way when you do export it fits into that perfect column and row cell structure that Excel loves so much. In this case let's go ahead and press OK. Like in the case of the PDF you have to choose where you want your report to go and what to name it of course. In this case I'm going to call it Report1 Excel, and I'm going to Save. Based on how much data you have you may get a window that pops up and tells you the progress of how many records it's exported. For Excel, prior to Excel 2007, the limit on number of rows and i.e., records of data that you may export are 65,000 or so. Even though Excel 2007 allows you to export potentially, theoretically billions of rows of data I do not recommend it. Let's go ahead and take a peek at our Excel File. One thing you want to notice is what Excel does. Notice there's not a whole lot of fancy formatting with the Data Only version that we've chosen and it lined it up fairly nice for us. The cleaner your format is the cleaner it is to export to Excel. Notice how I'd have to resize these so I could see the entire contents of each of the cells. Well, that pretty much sums it up for basic exporting and previewing. In following lessons we get into the in-depth ins and outs of how to make sure that your export does exactly what you want it to.
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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