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The Latest Report
CRYSTAL REPORTS SET TO MAINTAIN POPULARITY
Crystal Reports 9.0 is the latest release of the flagship reporting product from Crystal Decisions. It's also one of the most significant releases the company has put out in recent years, with many new features and enhancements tied back to developer or user requests.
Crystal Reports 9.0 features an updated user interface for creating reports with features designed to enhance productivity. The most valuable new features are the new report templates and reusable components. For reports that need to have the same look and feel, you can create a report template with your own formatting and then apply it to your own reports. The process of creating a report template is a bit cryptic at first, but once you figure out how it works it should save many hours spent formatting two (or more) reports to look similar.
If you find you're frequently creating the same calculations over and over, you can now reuse report components very easily. Crystal Reports 9.0 has a new feature called the Crystal Repository that can store text, images, and custom functions you've created. By default, the repository is stored in a Microsoft Access database. The help text states that you can move the repository to another database, but doesn't provide details on how to move it. As a new feature, it has a lot of potential, but without tools to actually manage the repository and better integration with the user interface, it's not going to be that useful for larger organizations until the feature matures.
For organizations with a large number of reports, the combination of report templates and component reuse will mean less time spent developing reports and more consistent output across multiple reports. But you may spend some additional time working out how to use these features and, in particular for the new repository, spend time figuring out how to integrate them into your existing infrastructure.
With formulas, there's now a new Formula Workshop that can be used to create formulas without a single line of code. Unfortunately, the enhancements made to this area and to the new Expert are neither intuitive nor easy...