Getting to know Crystal Reports

After opening Crystal Reports, you are presented with the Start Page. The start page is brand new for version XI. The goal is to make it easy to either open the most recent reports you have been working on or find out the latest news and updates about Crystal Reports. The majority of the page consists of links to online sample reports, important help topics, and the support page. In the middle of the page are links to create a new report with each report type being listed individually. The right column shows a list of the most recently used reports.

Figure 1-1. The Start Page.

The Start Page tab is actually an HTML file called Start.html that is stored within the Crystal Reports installation directory. If you know how to build web pages using HTML, you can customize this page. You could modify the color scheme to match your company’s corporate image and put your logo on it. If you are using Crystal Reports XI, the HTML files are in this folder:

C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Crystal Reports 11\en

If you are using Crystal Reports XI R2, the HTML files are in this folder:

C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Crystal Reports 11.5\Start Page\en

An important new feature to Crystal Reports is the Workbench. The workbench is useful for managing a large number of reports. Within the workbench, you can create projects and each project has multiple reports in it. By grouping reports into different projects, it becomes easier to manage where the reports are and how they are related to each other. If you use Business Objects Enterprise, with one click of the mouse, you can publish an entire project to the enterprise software so that reports can be viewed anywhere with a Web browser.