Understanding the Report Wizards

The report wizards make it easy to create most types of reports. By selecting your data source and clicking on a few buttons, you can quickly create new reports.

Depending upon your needs, creating reports can be a simple or complicated process. For example, it is very easy to print mailing labels from an address database or print a form letter to a list of subscribers. On the other hand, it can be very complicated to write a report that uses multiple sub-reports which are based off of user entered parameters. Fortunately, the report wizards that come with Crystal Reports make it easy to quickly produce a variety of reports. The wizards are useful for writing complex reports because they give you a way to quickly make a professional looking report that you can build upon with more complexity for your specific needs.

Since wizards are designed to be easy to use, you might be wondering why this chapter needs to explain them. The problem with wizards is that although they are supposed to be simple to use, a tool that is too simple is generally not very useful. As a result, many of today’s applications use wizards that are designed to achieve many tasks and sometimes require explanation to clarify their advanced functionality. Such is the case with Crystal Reports.

Each wizard consists of a multi-tabbed dialog box. Many of the tabs on each wizard are used elsewhere within the main functionality of Crystal Reports. This chapter summarizes each tab and the details are covered in later chapters, where applicable.