Crystal Reports XI: Beginner Tutorials
Introduction / What Crystal is and What It is Not
Subtitles of the Movie (Crystal Reports XI: Beginner / Introduction / What Crystal is and What It is Not)
What is Crystal Reports and what exactly are Crystal Reports? These questions are best answered by explaining what Crystal can and what it cannot do. Early in my professional career I was working with the IT director of a company, shall remain nameless, where we had just installed a brand new system that handled sales, the entire manufacturing chain, an accounting firm multinational operation. It was truly a feat of information technology and provided unprecedented control and insight to a business that was traditionally hit or miss. When asked about reports to make sense of the mountains of data this very system collected, the IT director replied nonchalantly, "Don't worry. We bought Crystal Reports. It comes with all the reports we need already." To say the least that turned out to be a gross miscalculation. Contrary to the inexplicable popular belief, Crystal does not automatically write the reports for you once installed. That would have made for a very brief career, and I would have been forced to find honest work. But I digress. Like any program, it does exactly what the user tells it to do for better for worse. With Crystal there are truths that are inescapable. Not only do you have to learn the program, but learn and decipher the rules and relationships of your specific database. How does that data flow through the system? Is it captured by human data entry or RFID tag? What processes or controls are in place? Don't worry if the preceding sentence made no sense. Crystal has many tools and features that help you in this endeavor, but it will not do the work for you. The old say, "Garbage in garbage out" is especially relevant working with Crystal and databases. While technology has resulted in a proliferation of data for all types of organizations, it has highlighted the fact that your reports, Crystal or otherwise, are only as good as the data behind it. This is what Crystal can do. It can mine data from virtually any data source, transform any type of data into information, export data into several formats, produce graphical representations of collected data, create standard reusable report templates, organize, analyze, and present data in virtually any format, provide the tools to work with all data bases and or sources, organize your business rules and logic into a flexible and transferable tool, and there's always the flip side Ð what Crystal cannot do. Crystal cannot understand or define the data relationships for your specific database. It cannot develop reports for you. It cannot analyze your specific database automatically. It cannot populate or update data in a database. It cannot fix garbage data automatically, and it does not come with canned reports that work right out of the box. Well, that wraps up what Crystal Reports is and is not. In the next movie we're going to talk about what you need.
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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