Once you’ve mastered the basics of creating reports, it’s time to learn some of the finer points of report design. Crystal Reports gives you numerous formatting options for printing report sections for specialized purposes. For example, you can create specialized reports such as labels or multi-column reports. You also have the option of creating multiple sections within a report and format each section individually. This one feature gives you an almost unlimited number of ways to make a report fit different scenarios and customize it for individual users. The first part of this chapter covers how to format Sections to create professional reports for any circumstance. You are given lots of creative examples of how to use Sections in real world reports.

Crystal Reports also makes your life easier by using report templates to quickly format a report in a certain way. You can use existing reports as the template for new reports. This creates consistency among all your reports without requiring any work on your part. You can also create report templates that are designed solely for the purpose of being used as a template and are never printed as a separate report.

Report alerts make it easy to highlight records that trigger special circumstances. The user is immediately alerted when data falls outside of acceptable ranges. By combining conditional formatting with report alerts, you can make a report that gives the user the option of viewing the alert records in a separate tab or having the detail data reflect which records should be reviewed.

Sections

Sections are used to determine where report objects appear on a report. Each section has a different purpose and different rules that determine when and where it should appear on a report. Certain sections only appear at the beginning or end of a report and other sections are only used when grouping data. We already discussed each type of section in Chapter 2, but here is a quick refresher. The Report Header/Footer sections appear on the first and last pages respectively. The Page Header/Footer sections appear at the top and bottom of a page respectively. The Group Header/Footer appear at the beginning and end of a group. The Details section appears once for every record displayed on the report.

Although each section follows certain rules, there are many options available for customizing a section so that the report comes out just right. We’ll look at the different formatting options available as well as how to add sub-sections to a report for greater customization. Let’s start by looking at the basic formatting options available for each section.