As powerful as the cross-tab report is for summarizing data, it has many limitations. These limitations are discussed throughout this chapter, but let’s look at two obvious ones first.

The first limitation is that the original grouping report has a lot of data on it that isn’t shown on the cross-tab. For example, the cross-tab report doesn’t show the fields for Employee ID or the Shipping Date. In fact, it doesn’t have any detail records shown. This is because cross-tabs can only show summary calculations.

The second limitation is that you can only print numbers in the summary fields. No text values are allowed. This is because each cell must calculate a summary function and summary functions can only return numbers. If you attempt to put a text field in the cell, the report defaults to printing a count of the text fields.

Given the benefits and drawbacks of cross-tab reports, you have to consider your alternatives before using the cross-tab report. The standard grouping report is easy to create and it is great for showing as much information as necessary. You also have complete control over the formatting. But the data could span many pages and this makes it harder to do analysis. The cross-tab report gives you the ability to quickly analyze summary data, but you have to give up looking at the detail records that make up the data.

If you have a report that needs both detail records and summary data, a solution is to combine the two reports. First, create a grouping report that prints all the necessary detail information. Then add a cross-tab object to the report header. The first page shows the user a summary of the critical information and the remaining pages let them dive into the details.