Crystal Reports 8.5: The Complete Reference

I develop financial reporting applications for various companies using VB and VBA. Recently I have completed a financial reporting system completely within Access 2000 making extensive uses of Access's report objects.Although the Access report object does its job well, it lacks a lot of power features, i.e., limited grouping capabilities, formula in text boxes is limited to a simply expression unless you make a call to UFD, then you would loss your object encapsulation, etc, The Data Report object is VB6 is still some what of a joke, but let not open this can of worms. Thus, I have chosen Crystals reports for my developing needs.I find George Peck's Complete Reference series very helpful. The book has 800 pages to teach me every nuance of Crystal. This book does not teach me anything about VB coding nor does it contain a reference to the object model within the RDC or any of the other object models in Crystal. I didn't buy this book to learn how to code. The author noted in page 659 specifically that the book is not meant to teach you Visual Basic.Overall, this book gets me up to speed quickly and it's a good reference source for my future needs. Personally, I don't find the crystal help files very helpful.

As a beginner, I have found this book to be very useful and it quickly has gotten me to the point that I need to be at. I can't confirm or deny that this is a complete reference, but I will say that if you're not comfortable with using Crystal Reports, at least start with this book more than any others. This is the one that actually gets your feel wet. As it does walk you through many basic things, it should probably have more of a beginner's title, or a tutorial title - The Complete Crystal Reports Learning Reference, something to that effect.

The second training class I took was taught by one of the editors of this book, who highly recommended it to me. This book is amazingly helpful and constantly disappears from my desk at work, as it is frequently borrowed by other Crystal users in my office. This truly has proved to be a terrific investment

After attending Level II and III training, I purchased this book for additional support. It was money well spent; each chapter (so far- I'm only up to Chpt. 13) has at least two useful bits of information you won't get in training or through the online help forum.On the whole, the book was well-written and can kept my attention fairly well. The included CD has necessary reports to illustrate the author's points. Examples point out not only how to best use CR, but why one might handle the software in a particular manner.

This is profound literature. Do not buy this book if you want to "Just Get By" in your report writing. If you need/want that edge on the competition; this is for you.