Absolute formatting is the regular kind of formatting that you can apply to text and fields with Crystal Reports in your quest to present data the best way for your audience. After you apply absolute formatting, the format is fixed, regardless of the values of the data making up the content of the report.

Absolute formatting can comprise setting how elements and text look — fonts, font color, centered or bold text, and so on — as well as how certain elements are presented, such as a date format.

Setting the fonts and their formatting for emphasis

Sure, the report might show what you want, but consider giving the report more visual appeal by changing the fonts of various report elements. A change as simple as making the text bold is a snap. Just select the text you want to change (in Design view, double-click the text box) and then click whatever formatting icon you want (say, Bold) from the Formatting toolbar.

Choosing the best font for the job, though, takes a little more consideration. You want the data presented in your report to be as clear, informative, readable, and attractive as possible. With that in mind, take the following into consideration:

• Readability

  Choose a font that is easy on the eyes. The tried-and-true fonts, such as Times New Roman and Arial, are pretty safe choices.

  Choosing a font couldn't be much more easy. Just select the font you want from the appropriate pane at the left end of the formatting toolbar. If you don't like what you see, it is easy to choose another.

• Viewer-available

  Choose fonts that are likely available on all the computers and printers used by the people who view the report.

  Warning

  If viewers don't have the same fonts loaded on their machines, Crystal Reports substitutes the one that it thinks is the closest to what you have specified. To see the most common fonts — the ones I recommend that you use to assure universally readable reports — see Table 8-1.

• Appropriate

  Choose fonts that fit your report. As I mention earlier in the book, you probably want to stick with something staid for a standard corporate presentation. However, if your business is a little on the adventurous side, you can get away with something sharper. Just envision your audience, and make sure that avante garde doesn't mean unreadable.

• Color

  Don't overlook using a color for your font. Color can really make a heading or a block of text stand out and command attention. Of course, that assumes that your viewer will be seeing this in color (not a problem in a slideshow or an online venue) or printing in color (a little more risky). Just remember to make the font color harmonize with whatever background color you choose. Of course, black text on a white background is very readable, and black text on a yellow background is supposed to be the most readable combination available. If you really want something to stand out in red text, though, avoid using that fuchsia background that caught your eye.

  Here's how to change font color:

  1. Right-click the text you want to change.

  2. Choose Format Field or Format Text (whichever is an option on the context menu that appears) to display the Format Editor.

  3. On the Font tab, choose whatever as the font color. You can also choose font, font style, and font size from here.

• Variety and continuity

  You can certainly mix and match fonts — to a point. Generally accepted design rules call for using sans serif fonts (without serifs, like Arial) for major headings and serif fonts (such as Times New Roman) for body text. Don't get carried away and use a lot of fonts, styles, colors, and sizes just because you can. Too jumbled an appearance gives you report an amateur look. On the other hand, using the same font for a repeated element adds an air of professionalism and continuity to your reports, giving readers a visual cue as to what a section will contain.

• Size

  Common sense will see you through this choice. Choose larger sizes for headings, smaller for subordinate headings, and smaller still for body text.

Table 8-1. Safe, Common Fonts

Name	Looks Like This
Times New Roman	Times New Roman
Arial	Arial
Courier New	Courier New
Bookman Old Style	Bookman Old Style

In this section, I show you how to tinker with the formatting in the Customer Report, Grouped by Region (Mexico), which is one of the reports from Chapter 6. The report is shown in Figure 8-1.

Figure 8-1. The Customer Report, Grouped by Region (Mexico) from Chapter 6.

Sure, the report shows what you want, but consider giving the report more visual appeal by changing the fonts of various report elements. For example, alter the report title:

1. In Design view, click the report title.

2. From the contextual menu that appears, right-click the text to activate Edit Text mode, and then select the entire title.

3. From the Formatting toolbar, choose one or more of the fonts available on your machine to give the report title a different look.

   Warning

   Make sure that whatever font you choose is also available on all the computers and printers used by the people who view the report. This is not a problem if you work in an organization where everyone has the same standard software on their machine. In a more diverse environment, you might have to give some thought to what might be running on your target audience's machines. Alternatively, you could play it safe and stick to the fonts listed in Table 8-1.

4. Select the style, size, and color of the font.

   In the present case, the style (bold, italic, and so on) and size are fine, but you might want to experiment with font color to get the look you want. Here's how:

   1. Right-click the text you want to change.

   2. Choose Format Text to display the Format Editor.

   3. On the Font tab, choose whatever as the font color.

   Figure 8-2 shows the report at this point (in black and white).

I chose the Bookman Old Style font face — a distinctive font, available on Windows machines — for the report title. I chose green as the color for the report title, date, grand total in the report footer, and the group headers. You can't see that in this book, but the color change adds some contrast to the report, grabbing more of the reader's attention.

I think that centering the date is a good idea. You might also want to change the date format. Crystal Reports provides a presentable default format — March 08, 2008 — but you can choose from many others: for example, 08-Mar-2008. Figure 8-3 shows the Date tab of Format Editor with a longer date format selected.

Figure 8-2. Selected font and color changes.

Figure 8-3. Format Editor's Date tab, with Month Day, Year selected.

Adding graphical elements for emphasis

Another technique you can use to improve the visual appeal of your reports is to add graphical elements (such as lines and boxes) for emphasis. For example, set off the report title from the body of the report by enclosing it in a box. Follow these steps to see how it changes the visual impact of a report:

1. Give the title some more vertical space, to make room for the outlining box.

   Expand the Report Header section: In Design view, drag down the lower border of the Report Header section about ¼ inch.

2. Center the report title vertically in the Report Header section.

3. 

   The cursor changes to a pencil.

4. Draw a box around the title by clicking and holding over one corner, dragging diagonally to the opposite corner, and releasing the mouse button.

   After you draw the box, you can format it.

5. Click the box to select it; then right-click it and choose Format Box.

   Format Editor appears, as shown in Figure 8-4.

   

   Figure 8-4. Format Editor with Box tab selected.

6. From the Box tab, select a line thickness and a color (or other options, if you like).

   I chose a medium thickness for the line and green as the color.

7. (Optional) Click the Rounding tab, and then choose the amount of rounding.

   Use settings on the Rounding tab to round the box corners to whatever extent you like, all the way from a rectangle to a circle. I selected a little bit of rounding (4%), as shown in Figure 8-5.

   See the result in Figure 8-6. It's a substantial improvement over the first version, which was created automatically by the Standard Report Creation Wizard.

Figure 8-5. You can change the appearance of the box.

Figure 8-6. The Mexico Orders report, with a boxed title.

Note

Using absolute formatting fixes the format unless you change it via the Design tab or Format Editor. If you want different formatting, depending on the data that you're displaying, use the extensive conditional formatting capabilities of Crystals Reports, which I discuss next.

In contrast to absolute formatting (which is fixed after you complete a report's design), you use conditional formatting to vary the appearance (or even the presence or absence) of a particular field, depending on the value contained in the field. From these choices, you get greater flexibility in how you can help your report's audience focus on relevant details.

For example, Xtreme (the company in the sample database used for this book) might want to draw attention to underperforming regions by coloring group totals red for all states or districts that have cumulative orders less than $2,000. A state might qualify for a red group total one month but (through additional sales) earn the right to a black group total the following month.

To demonstrate how to add conditional formatting to a report, use the Mexico Orders report from the preceding section and add the condition that group totals less than $2,000 should show as red rather than black.

Figure 8-8. The Customer Report, with group totals of less than $2,000 displayed in red.

Format Formula Editor is a powerful tool that you can use for creating complex conditions that govern what's shown on a report as well as how it prints. To maximize the capabilities of this editor, though, you need to know either the default formula-language syntax used in Crystal Reports or the BASIC language syntax. You can type a formula by hand or build it up by selecting fields, functions, and operators from the panes in the top half of the Editor.

There is, however, an easier way to get some of the features of Format Formula Editor — and without learning formula syntax: Use Highlighting Expert, coming up next.

Highlighting Expert is one of the easiest-to-use formatting tools in the Crystal Reports repertoire. Compared with Format Formula Expert, Highlighting Expert has limited flexibility, but you could use it instead of a formula to get the same red group total in the preceding section. Here's a major difference to note: Highlighting Expert operates only on number and currency fields; Format Formula Editor works on any type of field.

To see Highlighting Expert in action, follow these steps:

Figure 8-10. Highlighting Expert dialog box with formatting condition.

Figure 8-11. Report based on modification done with Highlighting Expert.

You can add graphical images to a report to further enhance its visual appeal. You can even add Flash animations. I cover Flash animations and the interactivity that is possible with them in Chapter 17. Here I stick to talking about static pictures.

To add a picture — bitmapped graphic images — to your report, follow these steps:

You now have a report fit for the eyes of a Vice President of Sales!

Figure 8-12. The report includes a graphic image.

Preprinted forms are designed to be filled out by hand or run through a sprocket-fed line printer. When using a laser or inkjet printer, it's devilishly hard to line up text with the lines and boxes on the form that are supposed to hold that text. Most people are more likely to have a laser or inkjet printer than a sprocket-fed printer these days, so alignment can be a problem.

Crystal Reports offers a clever solution to aligning text to preprinted forms. Because a report can have both text and graphical elements, and one can overlie the other, you can align text perfectly to a preprinted form by following a few simple steps involving a scanner:

Crystal Reports is primarily designed to take data from a database, process it, format it, and then display it to the user. However, it can also display blocks of text from document files. You can control the formatting of the text block by sizing the text object that you insert it into.

To insert a block of text into a report, follow these steps:

Report developers can customize the development environment from settings available on the Options dialog box (see Figure 8-13).

Figure 8-13. Options dialog box, with Layout tab selected.

To open this dialog box, just choose File

As you can read to this point, the broad array of Crystal Reports' formatting options gives you a lot of creative latitude for how your reports present information. Those options make your job of communicating much easier. However, Crystal Reports offers other modes of communication that are just as effective. One of the most powerful is Crystal Reports' charting capability, which is the subject of Chapter 15.

Crystal Reports enables you to include report metadata within the report that the metadata is describing. Metadata is data about data, and report meta-data is descriptive data about a report. For many kinds of reports, you might want to include metadata items in the report itself. For example, readers might want to know the date when the data in the report was last refreshed. They might want to know the name of the author of the report. You can display such things in your reports as special fields, which are accessible from the Special Fields list in Field Explorer. Well over a dozen special fields are available there, each one holding pertinent information about the report. You can drag them onto your report and drop them wherever you like.

Sometimes the data in a report indicates a condition that requires urgent attention on the part of the report reader, but the urgency might not be readily apparent just from perusing the report. To make sure that the urgency gets across, Crystal Reports offers Report Alerts, which are custom messages that appear when certain conditions are met by data in the report. You can set a Report Alert to merely inform the reader of the condition, or specify a course of action to take.

Create a Report Alert by entering a formula, using the Formula Workshop. I discuss the Formula Workshop extensively in Chapter 10. In a Report Alert, the formula evaluates conditions that you specify. If the overall condition evaluates to TRUE, the alert is triggered, and its message is displayed. The message can be a text string, either by itself or combined with one or more report fields.

As an example, suppose that the Xtreme sales manager wants to be alerted whenever a customer in Mexico orders more than $5,000 of merchandise. A Report Alert added to the Customer Orders by State or District (Mexico) report will do the job. First, create the text of the alert. Then, set the condition that will trigger the alert.

Here's how to add the message itself:

Now specify what condition must occur that will trigger the display of this Report Alert:

Figure 8-17. Enter the condition formula to trigger the alert.

Figure 8-18. The BonusTime alert is present and enabled.

To see the Report Alert in action, just click the Refresh icon on the Standard toolbar. The Refresh Report Data dialog box pops up, asking you whether you really want to refresh the report data. And you do, so click OK.

If any customers have orders that exceed $5,000, now a Report Alert pops up to let you know. Figure 8-19 shows what one looks like.

To see exactly how big the order total is, click the View Records button in the Report Alerts dialog box.

Figure 8-19. BonusTime Report Alert, showing a customer whose order exceeds $5,000.

Crystal Reports does indeed make report creation easy, but it still takes considerable thought and work on your part to design reports that are well proportioned, presented with an attractive choice of fonts, drawing elements, colors, and layout.

Considering the time that you invest to create one report, it would be nice if you could recycle your work to use in a similar report down the road. You save time and effort, while creating a visual consistency from one report to the next that conveys professionalism.

You can achieve that consistency and save that time and effort by using a report template, which is an existing report, complete with formatting, that you can use as a starting point for a new report that you create. You don't have to create the new report from scratch; you have to change only the things that are different between the template report and the new report you are creating. And sometimes you don't have to change anything.

Apply the template as the last step in your report creation process and voilà! You're finished, creating a polished, professional report in a fraction of the time it would normally take to create one.

Applying a template to an existing report

Applying a template to an already existing report is easy. To see just how easy, look again at the Big Orders report from Chapter 5; see Figure 5-17 (with a $5,000 lower limit) and again here in Figure 8-20 (with a $9,000 lower limit).

It looks pretty plain, but you can spruce it up with one of the Crystal Reports standard templates. Here's how:

1. 

   The Template Expert, as shown in Figure 8-21, opens.

   

   Figure 8-20. Big Orders report, run with a $9,000 lower limit.

   

   Figure 8-21. Template Expert dialog box, before a template is selected.

2. From the Available Templates pane, select Block (Blue), then click OK.

The Template Expert disappears. After a few seconds, the Block formatting is applied to your report. In this example, the result looks like Figure 8-22.

Figure 8-22. Big Orders report with Block (Blue) formatting applied.

In this case, the template's headings override the original headings. (The detail rows are unchanged.) And if the formatting that the template gives you is close to what you want but not exactly perfect, change to Design view and make the changes you want. For starters, you probably want to replace the Business Objects logo in the page header with your own logo.

Note

Any template alterations you make are much less work than setting all your formatting from scratch.

When you're finished tweaking, save this report with the name Big Orders with Template.

Applying a template to a report you're creating

When you create a report with the Standard Report Creation Wizard, the wizard steps you through a series of views. We have already seen several of these. Below is a complete list, the last of which is Template view.

• Data: Select tables to include in your report.

• Links: If you're including more than one table, specify here how the tables are linked.

• Fields: Specify which fields from the selected tables you're going to use.

• Grouping: Separate records into groups in the report (for example, grouping customers by country).

• Summaries: Specify any summaries that you want to include in the report, such as totals or averages of numerical data.

• Group Sorting: Specify the order in which you want groups sorted.

• Chart view: Specify what kind of chart you want to create to give a graphical representation of your data.

• Record Selection: Filter out records that you don't want.

• Template: Choose this from the Template view of the Standard Report Creation Wizard. This wizard, as shown in Figure 8-23, looks very similar to the Template Expert shown in Figure 8-21. They resemble each other because they serve similar purposes.

If some of the preceding listed views aren't relevant, they don't appear, depending on the choices you make as you progress through the wizard.

Figure 8-23. Template view of the Standard Report Creation Wizard, showing the templates available.