Understanding the Crystal Reports Gallery
The Report Gallery is a special dialog that is presented when you choose to create a new report file. The Report Gallery is a shortcut to various report creation wizards, which facilitate the guided, visual creation of reports.
As Figure 1.12 illustrates, the Crystal Reports Gallery is a dialog that serves as the gateway to accessing and using the various report creation wizards. From the Report Gallery dialog, you can select from one of the four provided report wizards:
- Standard Used to create traditional columnar-styled reports.
- Cross-Tab Used to create summary styled Cross-Tab reports.
- Mail Labels Used to create reports with multiple columns, such as address labels.
- OLAP Used to create summary styled Cross-Tab reports that are based on an OLAP data source.
Figure 1.12. The Crystal Reports Gallery dialog provides quick access to the various report creation wizards.
The remainder of this section focuses on exploring and using the Standard Report Creation Wizard. In general, this is the most commonly used report wizard, and it provides a good introduction to the components of the report design process. If your interests lie in either OLAP or Cross-Tab reports, they are covered in later chapters.