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15 - Crystal Reports – Tying Databases to Output

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Jim McKeown
Affiliation:
Dakota State University
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Summary

VB Quip

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.

John F. Kennedy

The world runs on databases. Data of all kinds are tracked and stored, managed, massaged, manipulated, and, sometimes mangled. You got of taste of that in the last chapter. You even saw a little of it with control breaks back in Chapter 9. A report is the key tool for managing data. With a report, data become information, a list of numbers becomes a total or an average, and meaningless figures become a report, complete with a colored chart. Crystal Reports is a full-featured database reporting tool from Business Objects®. It crunches the numbers and produces printable reports. It's one of literally hundreds of third-party add-ons for Visual Studio. It handles data from almost any database and integrates it into reports.

VB Tip

Crystal Reports works with the Professional version of Visual Studio. It will not work with the Express Edition. A thirty-day free trial of Crystal Reports is available from SAP at http://www.sap.com/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/index.epx

Crystal Reports Tutorial

VB Tip

Place the database files in a folder on your hard drive called C:\CRFiles. That makes your reports easily portable.

Be sure to use the Professional version of Visual Studio and have either the trial version or the full version of Crystal Reports installed on your system. Make sure the TouristStops.mdb database is in the C:\CRFiles folder on your system. TouristStops is an Access database that contains information on vacation spots throughout the United States.

Type
Chapter
Information
Programming in Visual Basic 2010
The Very Beginner's Guide
, pp. 601 - 630
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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