Crystal Reports XI Official Guide

I have been working with Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise for over 4 years now and this is one of the few books I'd recommend to customers and coworkers who are about to develop distribute complex reporting solutions to a audience of any size. This book covers a great deal of areas and allows the developer to grow from beginner to advanced in a farely short period of time. A must read for anyone who develops reports.

A confidently recommended, start-to-finish, 888-page reference for users of Crystal Reports and the entire suite of Enterprise Reporting products. Includes content, tutorials and samples for reporting within the Microsoft Visual Studio.NET environment and on the SAP Business Information Warehouse. Author and Crystal Reports expert Neil Fitzgerald has a distinctive flair for providing even the most novice computer operator or programmer with a completely "user friendly" text that can be quickly and readily absorbed. Anyone dealing with Crytal Reports (or any other aspect of the Enterprise Reporting softwares) would be well advised to add Special Edition Using Crystal Reports 10 to their professional reference shelf.

Remember how computers were supposed to get rid of paper. Everything was going to be processed like magic and only the conclusions needed to be reviewed. OK, so all of your data is in a database and it's your job to do INFORMATION DELIVERY and to create BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE. How do you take all that data and present it in a manner that is timely enought and easily understood enough for management to understand and make decisions. Of course you could use the standard reports that come with the software package you're using. But they are not what management wants. Of course you could write SQL statements to get at the data, and then program what's printed or displayed. But what a pain. Enter Crystal Reports with its drag and drop philosophy of building the reports to provide the information you need. The book is broken into two main parts. The first half or so is oriented to content creation, how to collect an analyze the information you have available. The second is on distribution of this data through all the means available today from the printed page, the web, and the new .NET /COM channel.

I had used Crystal Reports in a few projects previously and was tasked with using it again in a large upcoming initiave. I decided to review the current books out there to see what could best help me get back up to speed and give me a deep enough level of material that I could continuously learn from - this book is it. The Book covered Crystal Report Design in a thorough way that let me get back up to speed quickly and the tips and tricks provided in the chapters were great in showing me how to create Crystal reports in an optimal way. The book took me through all the necessary preliminaries like data-source connections, field selection, grouping, filtering, sorting, etc and then led me to advanced features like Cross-tabs, Report Templates, Charting and Business Views (we use Crystal Enterprise too). Unlike the other books I reviewed on the market, this one enabled me to not only create great reports using Crystal Reports but also taught me how to deliver those over the web through my custom application - a huge time saver and as mentioned provided great coverage of the other Crystal (or Business Objects) products so that I could actually construct a growth plan for my Crystal Enterprise infrastructure. Over-all - highly recommended. AS