Exporting Crystal Reports Using Inherent Features
Crystal Reports is one of the most popular report writing tool in the world today. It is designed to provide you with the facility to design and create enterprise reports, from virtually any single or multiple database sources, retrieving the relevant data selectively. The report writer allows you to format your reports, use the in-built formulas and cross-tabs, create sub-reports, and perform conditional formatting. The features of Crystal Reports do not end just by creation of reports. It provides you with features, using which, you can publish your reports in variety of ways, such as, Microsoft Word and Excel, email, and even over the Web. Exporting Crystal Reports has been made easy by the inherent features in the report writer.
While you export Crystal Reports .NET to, for example, Excel, the output may seem to be unusable, and would need a lot of re-formatting in the spreadsheet. This tends to make things difficult and time wasting. Crystal Reports allow few programming steps to produce perfect Excel exports of every report that you create in Crystal Reports. In exporting Crystal Reports to Excel, the report writer performs WYSIWYG translation of the report object. With Crystal Reports trying to place the report using the x/y coordinates, while Excel on the other hand uses its line-by-line row/column placement. This creates the problem.
The features in Crystal Reports version 9.0 have an extended Excel option, while the version 10.0 has replaced that by "Data only". In both the cases, when you export Crystal Report to Excel, the objects are placed as closely as possible in row/column configuration, so much so, that the Excel spreadsheet would require quite an effortful formatting. Since none of the options are available in Crystal Reports, there has to be some formatting, and design changes made for the purpose.
The whitepaper that has been recently brought out by Business Objects can be located at http://support.businessobjects.com/communityCS/TechnicalPapers/cr10_export_excel.pdf.asp, and this paper presents easy some useful information regarding the exporting Crystal Reports to Excel. In exporting Crystal Reports to Microsoft Excel, the format of the report is likely to change, and the paper goes on to illustrate how you could avoid some of these from the tools available with Crystal Reports version 10.0. When you are creating a report to be exported to Excel, the format of the report should be similar to the layout of the spreadsheet. You need to take care in avoiding over lapping of the objects in your report, in the way that, each object should represent a cell in the Excel spreadsheet. In order that there are no blank spaces in the exported Excel sheet, you would need to minimise the height of each section, using the 'Fit' option in your Crystal report version 10 report writers. At the same time, the objects in your report must appear in the same line and height as that of Excel, as you prepare exporting Crystal Reports. This can be achieved through your report designer in the report writer. In the same way, all your objects, that need to appear in the Excel spreadsheet, should be appearing in all the relevant columns, with proper alignment. The report formatting feature in Crystal Reports version 10 uses grids and guidelines, facilitating the required formatting of your object, as preparing exporting Crystal Reports to your Excel spreadsheet. The whitepaper guides you through the steps that need to be done in exporting Crystal Reports to Microsoft Excel. It is easy to follow and you would soon learn the ways to format your reports, before you export them to Excel.
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