Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie we're going to go over the Exporting of reports with applied templates. As I've alluded to in prior lessons, exporting can be tricky enough, but with templates it can be even trickier. The main driving factor in this complexity is which format you're planning to export to. Or even how you're going to print. What needs to be clarified is what type of report are you actually exporting or printing? Is it a Detail level report, like this one here with over 18,000 records of raw data to sort through? The bigger the report is, the more record it has, the longer it takes to export, and same goes, the longer it takes to print. Then of course, the more records a file has once its exported, the longer it takes to open and the more system memory it takes on your local PC. These are all things to keep in mind when exporting or printing. For example, in this case, we only have 18,000 records, but if your PC is an older one, it might take a while to open up and export from this Crystal Report to show all of this. So the first thing we're going to do, just to make our lives a little bit easier, is filter the data. We're going to go to the Select Expert, we're going to choose Revenue Date, and from the drop-down we're going to say is greater than or equal to, and then we'll put 1 /1 /2007. You could also type in the Date Time Stamp if you like, but Crystal will add it for me automatically. Press OK. We're going to use the Save Data this time, and now we have something a little more manageable. As I mentioned before, when exporting, it helps to know what formats you're going to go into when designing the report. As a best bet, if you have lots of fancy formatting PDF would be a good way to go, simply because what you see is what you get. It pretty much mimics what you see on the screen. Allow me to demonstrate. Let's go ahead and click on the Export button and choose our Format. If I scroll to the top I'll find Adobe PDF, my destination will be a Disk File, and I press OK. This is a neat feature here. Create Bookmarks from a Group Tree. This helps you navigate the PDF file a little bit easier by the groups that you've chosen in your Crystal Report. Let's go ahead and Check that, and let's press OK. Then we're going to choose a location, and I'm just going to put it on my Desktop. I'll call it Template Sample PDF. Let's go ahead and Save. This brings up the Exporting Records Window. Now, looking at my Crystal Report I have one of 98 pages, and as we mentioned before the larger report, especially page-wise and record-wise, the longer it takes to export. This was actually fairly quick. Let's do a comparison side-by-side. I'm going to Export again, but this time I'm going to choose Microsoft Excel. Not the Data Only, just the first one in the list, and press OK. I'm going to press OK again, and from here I'm going to call this Template Excel 2, and Save. I get the same Export Window, and it goes through how many records it's exporting. Now if I go to my Desktop we can now compare the two exports. The first one is the Template PDF. I'm going to go ahead and open that with Adobe Reader, and you see how this works? It's pretty much what you see what you get. What you see in your Crystal Report you now get in PDF. Not only that, with those Bookmark options, you have AHARTS you can skip straight to Albertson's, and Albertson's 2008. You can go to the Amory Exchange and go to 2007 and skip to 2008. This comes in handy. And again, it's the same formats you're looking for. Now this doesn't help you if you need to go through a deeper-level analysis. That's why people use Excel. If I minimize that and I go to my Template Excel 2 file, and I open that, first of all you'll notice that the Excel takes a little bit longer. This Excel file had to translate the report into a cell-by-cell basis. Now, here's the same report but in Excel. It came through with the pictures and the formatting, and the spaces and the groups, and things are a little bit off as you can tell. You'd have to do a little bit of formatting before you could actually use the data. You also don't have that handy guide that helps you skip around to different clients if you need to see it. A lot of this is simply going to come down to what is the purpose of the report? Is it meant for further analysis and number crunching, or is it a simply display and reconciliation? As we've mentioned before, the Template you choose often determines how well it exports to a certain format. In general, if you're going to design for a specific format, keep in mind it may not translate well into another type of format. Like a heavily detailed format, such as the Wave as we've chosen, would not go well into let's say a text file, simply because a text file would only suck out the raw data but wouldn't give you any summary-level data. I encourage you to experiment and play around with the templates and the exporting to see how well a certain style may or may not work for you.