Learning Crystal Reports is not difficult. However, you need to spend a few hours or a few days to learn the basics. I have reached the conclusion that the best way of learning Crystal Reports is through video tutorials. 135 minutes of watching and 5 minutes of reading! Let's get started.

 

 

Crystal Reports is very often used to report data from databases. In this lesson, we will create a database in SQL Server, and then we will create the first report. The first thing you need to do is creating a database and tables. Then we'll use Crystal Reports and create the first report.

 

 

 

Once we've created a report, we need to make it look good. In this lesson, we will learn how to sort and group data and change the font format. We will also add a page header, page footer, and a report header.

 

 

 

The power of Crystal reports lies in the fact that it is possible to transfer parameters to reports. Parameters make the report more dynamic, it is possible to display data depending on the value of parameters. In this lesson, I will also show you how to create simple formulas. Parameters and formulas are very important elements of reports.

 

 

 

Reports can be nested in another report. Usually, subreports should be linked to the report and this is what this lesson will be about. At the end of this lesson, I will show you how to create unlinked subreports.

 

 

 

In this lesson I will show you some other way to build reports - we'll use the Blank Report option. There are also defined templates in Crystal Reports, so we will learn how to use them.

 

 

 

In this lesson, you will learn how to create charts and maps. These two components are useful when you want to visualize data. Crystal reports is not the best tool to create dashboards, but with a little effort, you can create simple dashboards.

 

 

 

Cross-tab report, it's a special kind of report. This kind of report is used to present data in the form of a pivot table.

 

 

 

A little more about the formulas will be in this lesson. We will create custom functions and we will create a formula for conditional coloring of data. We will also create some other useful formulas.

 

 

 

When we have a ready report, sometimes it is necessary to exchange the data source. Most often we use this option to create a new report similar to the existing one. Usually, we copy the report, change the data source and in a few minutes, we have a new report ready. The second topic discussed in this lesson is the Crystal Viewer tool. Crystal Viewer is a free tool for opening and viewing CR reports.