Contributed by Herb Hess, BOCP & BOEP. When Herb isn't building world-class Business Objects Enterprise solutions or teaching, he takes his kids to the beach or roller skating and serves as Mayor in exile of Haddonfield, NJ.

Building Crosstab and Financial Reports the EASY way!

Crystal Report developers have been happy to have the Crosstab object available for many years.  Similar to a pivot table, the Crosstab allows Crystal Reports developers to sum up volumes of data by both rows and columns, creating a grid or a table of results that illustrate patterns and trends.  For example “Which regions are showing sales increases over the last six months?  Which customer categories are increasing their outstanding balances overdue by 61 to 90 days?  What per cent of new customers are selecting our new service offering vs. the traditional offering?”  All of these questions are easily answered with a Cross-tab object in a Crystal Report.

Like a car that runs out of gas miles before you arrive home, however, Cross-tabs were often abandoned for more complex and labor-intensive report designs once management began to ask for embedded calculations such as year over year growth percentages, variances from budget, and more.  The rigid nature of the Cross-tab object in Crystal Reports prior to Crystal Reports 2008 provided no way to generate and include these columns into the cross-tab (or at least no way that any developer really looked forward to creating).  Please review this video tutorial (sound required) to see how the enhancements to the Crosstab object can save you hours of development within Crystal Reports 2008.

Follow this link to the recorded Tip of the Month.

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