Advanced Tutorials

By now, you realize that cross-tab reports are a very powerful way of summarizing data and presenting it in an easy to read format. So far, we have been limited to basing cross-tabs on data fields, but there is so much more you can do with them. By using formulas and parameters as the summarized field, you can customize the formatting and data of the cross-tab. This increases the flexibility of cross-tab reports even more.

The next three tutorials demonstrate this by using the CrossTab.rpt sample report that is installed with Crystal Reports. Let’s look at this report before continuing on with the tutorials.

Figure 13-11. The CrossTab.rpt sample report.

Figure 13-11 is a snapshot of the CrossTab.rpt sample report. The detail rows are Product Name and they are summarized by Product Type. Along the top of the report, the data is grouped by the quarters of the year and it shows the first month of the available data. Within each quarter, the product sales are totaled and their percentage of the overall total is displayed.