Crystal Reports in the Real World—Advanced Formatting

Often, a report section needs to be more than simply one color or another. A report with many rows might need some color to help guide the readers eye and make each line distinctly separate from the next. In the following sample, the report Chap7AdvFormat.rpt created earlier is modified to improve readability:

1.	Open the Chap7AdvFormat.rpt report.
2.	From the Report menu, select Section Expert. When the Section Expert dialog window opens, select the Details section and click the Color tab.
3.	As previously described, checking the Background Color box enables you to set all the Detail lines to a single color. The intent here is to highlight the detail lines so they appear distinctly different from the detail line above and below to improve readability. Click the x+2 button and enter the following text into the code window: If Remainder(RecordNumber,2)=1 Then crAqua Else DefaultAttribute;
4.	Finally, go back to the Section Expert. Select Group Footer from the list of sections and check the box labeled New Page After.
5.	Now, each group starts on a new page, and long groups have detail lines defined by color. The color improvement can be seen on page 3 of the report. Figure 7.13. Records are delimited by color for improved readability. [View full size image]
6.	Save the report as Chap7AdvFormatPaginated.rpt.