Reporting is ease with SAP Crystal Reports

Reporting is essential in order to achieve success, the prerequisite for any business is to take benefit of enormous data available. I am writing this blog as a part of my assignment for the course ERP Applications – BCO6181 – Victoria University of Technology taught by Tony de Thomasis. I choose sap_crystalreports_2013 because it has been taught in tutorials of Business Analytics Course and I was inspired that how easily even beginners can use it with ease to analyse data and build reports out of it without having specialised skills. However, this blog is not about the technical aspects of Sap Crystal Reports but discuss the essential aspects of it.

SAP Crystal reports provide the benefit of creating vibrant reports in heaps of format and in different languages. Data from multiple platforms and in diverse forms can be presented into collaborative vibrant as SAP crystal reports have intuitive design interface and efficient workflows. It also supports the sub reporting, graphing and limited GIS functionality.

SAP crystal reports is the vigorous tool that can create and retrieve real time operational reports from multiple virtual data sources such as applications, gateways and even from mobile devices. Data from multiple spreadsheets of Microsoft Excel can be exported into the single spreadsheet because of XLSX export.

Steps to Create reports:

Selecting a wizard : SAP Crystal Reports offer variety of wizards that guide them through a number of input screens to create a report.

Report Wizard: It helps the user to select the required data source and to select tables which he wants to include in report.
Cross-Tab Report Wizard: User can create report in which the data is displayed as a cross-tab object with the help of this wizard.
Mailing Label Report Wizard: In this wizard user can create and print report of mailing label size. User can create multi-column style report by defining his own layout of rows and columns and can select a commercial label type.
OLAP Cube Report Wizard: User creates OLAP data reports as a grid object which includes dimensions from the OLAP data source.

Selecting data source: To create reports user needs to connect Crystal Reports to required data source. User can make selection and link the tables from Microsoft Excel Oracle databases, and local file-system. The information sources to which Crystal reports can connect can be Native, ODBC, OLE DB, and JDBC connectivity to relational, OLAP, Web services, XML, enterprise data sources, and salesforce.com Database Expert: It predicts some of the links between the tables but is unable to predict the links of the tables with same fields but having different names. However, User can link them manually. It displays the primary keys of each table.

Creation of Report: The report creation screen of Crystal Reports is divided into five different parts

Report Header – The report title and the data user wants to be displayed at the start of the report is written in this section. It is also used to include the complete report data for charts and cross-tabs.
Page Header – All the data that user wants to print on the top of each report page is written in this section. For example: document name, user name, etc. Field titles above the fields on a report can also be displayed by using this section.
Page Footer – Page number and any other related information that needs to be displayed at the end of the report page is written in this section.
Details – The body of report and the bulk report data appears in the detail section. This data is printed once per record.
Report Footer – the information that needs to be displayed at the end of the report appears in this section. In case of charts and cross-tabs this section includes the data of the entire report.

Inserting fields into a report: User can insert fields into the report by using Field Explorer pane that allows user to drag fields to the various report sections. Crystal Reports also enables users to browse the field data as it is tough to recall the required field when there are numerous fields. The fields can be renamed, resized, combined and can even be removed from report. User can also move and change the order of fields. It also enables user to add graphics to the report such as a logo of the company and conditional formatting of the report to highlight the exceptions and key values of reports. Grouping of data can also be done in order to reduce time to search and scan the required data in the report.Sap Crystal reports enables user to add additional fields to reports such as range of calculation fields with the help of tab. For example: total and summary fields as well as defined calculations. It displays the Formula Workshop – Formula Editor screen that displays the built-in functions and operators.

Previewing report: Print Preview icon on the Standard toolbar enables user to validate the appropriate format of report data at any time. Preview tab at the right of the Design tab is activated that offers the user to switch between the design and preview tab by making the changes and than verifying the changes simultaneously.
Documenting A Report: The special fields tab in the Field Explore enables user to add the information relevant to the report for future references. However, Crystal Reports offers a many pre-defined fields that can be used to add such information such as author of report, report date, purpose of report, currency etc.

created by:

Kiranjot Kaur