How Should I Use This Guide?

The best way to use this guide depends largely on your reporting experience. Refer to one of the sections below to understand what you’ll learn in this guide and how Seagate Crystal Reports may be different from the tool you’re using now. While Seagate Crystal Reports makes reporting as simple and as fast as possible, it’s still important to have some basic understanding of databases and related terminology.

New to Reporting or Crystal Reports

If you’re new to Crystal Reports, you’ll find that it uses a "banded" report structure to design reports. This is simply a logical way of breaking up the report into headers, footers, summary groups and detailed data. Crystal Reports is a very powerful reporting tool, but has a number of features which make it easy to design both simple and fairly complex reports. It also can interface to virtually any data source and has a large number of formatting features for producing presentation-quality reports.

You should read the Product Overview section and complete some of the Test Drive exercises to get a feel for reporting with this release. You should have no trouble working through the examples in this guide, but for more information on Seagate Crystal Reports and report design in general, you should consult the online help. You may also want to open some of the supplied sample reports to get a better idea of the different types of reports and how they look in the designer.

Existing Crystal Reports Users

If you already use a previous version of Seagate Crystal Reports, you will already be familiar with a lot of the reporting concepts and terminology used in this guide. This guide will help you understand how the Report Designer integrates the reporting environment into your applications and how to take advantage of some of the event oriented features.

Version 5 or 6

If you’re a version 5 or 6 user, you’ll notice that the Crystal Report Designer and most menus look fairly similar to what you’re using now. The major visible differences are the addition of several new menu items and buttons, the Analyzer view for charts and maps, and several new report experts. You'll also notice a new look for parts of the user interface including the formula editor and report gallery.

The best way to get a quick overview of these and other changes is to browse the What's New in Version 7 section and complete the Test Drive exercises.

Other Versions
If you’re a user of earlier versions of Seagate Crystal Reports, you’ll notice a new look and feel in the designer interface with easier ways of adding and manipulating fields, sections and other report objects. If you look through the various menus, you'll see that there a lot more formatting and data manipulation choices and several new report experts.

Reading the Product Overview section will give you an idea of the major changes between the version you are using now and this release. The  What's New in Version 7 section will give you more details about the most recent changes and the Test Drive exercises will give you hands-on experience with most of them. You may also want to open some existing reports to see how they look in this release and become more familiar with the various menus and options.


To Find Out More


The User's Guide and Help files are excellent sources of information on product features and usage. Also, be sure to check the Seagate Crystal Reports web site for product information, technical information and the latest news about Seagate Crystal Reports.


For the latest information about this product, please visit the web site at www.seagatesoftware.com/crystalreports.

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