Example 6-5. Alternating the background color.
A common reason for alternating the background color of sections is to make the report easier to read. It can be hard to visually move your eyes across a report and stay on the same row. To make this easier to do, reports often alternate the background color of each row. This is similar to the green-bar report paper that was frequently used at corporations.
This is done by creating two detail sections with different background colors. The Suppress formatting formula for each section would be either
Or
Once you become familiar with all the different formatting options available within Crystal Reports, you will find that there are many ways to do the same thing. For example, if you want to change the background color of a section to red when a salesperson’s quota isn’t met, there are two ways you could do it. One solution would be to have two different sections as just discussed. Another solution would be to use only one section and put that same formula in the Background Color property. This will only turn the background color to red when the formula is true. Both solutions work equally well, although in this example using a single section would require less work. The more you work with Crystal Reports, the more you will learn different tricks. The ones you use will depend upon what you think best fits the situation at the time.
