Creating Crystal Analysis Reports

Introduction

The concept of OLAP was introduced in Chapter 16, "Multidimensional Reporting Against OLAP Data with Crystal Reports." With OLAP it is relatively easy to create professionally formatted Crystal Reports based on multidimensional data sources. These types of formatted reports are targeted for end users who require only one clean viewpoint into the OLAP Data. Crystal Analysis provides a more interactive end-user environment with the reports so that speed of thought interactive viewing is available to end users. This chapter introduces Crystal Analysis and the richness of interactivity it can add to your reporting environment.

One of the key challenges facing organizations today is providing actionable information to business managers, enabling them to make decisions in a timely manner based on concrete data. This chapter shows how Crystal Analysis Professional can be used to deliver compelling analytical reports to end users.

This chapter covers the following information:

• Introduction to Crystal Analysis
• Data connectivity options for Crystal Analysis
• Introduction to the powerful Worksheet object
• Introduction to the Charting object