Reports are written to communicate information to people. This could be as simple as a list of the CDs you have in your music collection or as complex as a set of financial statements for a multi-national corporation. While these reports can be for your own personal use, many reports are for others to read. They can be passed out to others in the office, displayed on the internet, or used to bill clients. It’s important that you find the best way to get your reports to the people who want to read them.
How reports are distributed has been changing over the past two decades. In the past, reports were always printed out and distributed on paper. But in the days of the internet, this has become archaic. Even the most secure institutions now give you incentives for replacing paper based reports such as your monthly credit card statement and financial portfolios with an online-only version. In fact, many people have speculated that one day we will work in a ‘paperless environment’ where everything is done electronically. While we certainly aren’t at that point yet, paper reports are quickly losing favor among companies and their customers.
Crystal Reports gives you many options for distributing your reports. While printing them out is the most obvious of the different methods, you can also send them via email, display them on the internet, and export them to file formats that can be used by other applications.
Exporting Reports
You can export reports in a variety of formats that are displayed by common applications that most people already have on their computers (Adobe Acrobat PDF, MS Excel, MS Word, etc.). This lets people see and understand your data without owning a copy of Crystal Reports. For example, the PDF format is the most common way of presenting data via the web. In fact, it has become the de facto standard and most users already have the Adobe Acrobat viewer installed on their computer. If you want to deliver reports that let users have dynamic interaction with the data, you can export them to an Excel spreadsheet and give your users the ability to perform more advanced data analysis.
Crystal Reports gives you eleven types of export formats to choose from. Not only can you choose between which application to export to (Adobe Acrobat, Excel, etc.), but you can also choose whether the export should focus on keeping the layout intact or just exporting the raw data.
If users are primarily using the report for viewing, keeping the layout and format intact is of primary importance. You want to make sure the exported file looks as close to the original report as possible. Aspects such as font size, shading, graphics, and object placement should remain unchanged as much as possible.
If the user wants to perform analysis on the data or import it into another application, the report layout is no longer important and instead you want to export the raw data. You want each record in the report to have its own line in the export file. In fact, having formatting in the export actually hinders being able to use the data because it is extraneous information.
