Crystal Reports® 2008 For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Sorting, Grouping, and Totaling Report Data

In This Chapter

• Putting report data in a logical order by sorting

• Clustering similar data items with grouping

• Figuring out percentages

• Adding drill-down functionality

• Adding things with running totals

• Solving sorting, grouping, and totaling problems

The primary goal when creating a report is to put database data into a meaningful and easily understandable form. To achieve this goal, you must extract only the data you want, from the specific rows and columns of the relevant tables. However, if you don't present the information in the report in a logical manner, meaning and understanding can suffer.

You can greatly enhance the value of a report by arranging the retrieved data in a way that clearly conveys what that data means and emphasizes its important features. Sort the records, and group related records in such a way that the significant information is emphasized. Crystal Reports has powerful tools to help you sort report data in a variety of ways, group related data, and summarize data within groups.

Sorting Report Data

In most cases, the original order of the data in a database is not the most helpful order, so you need to reorder the data for your purposes. The sort function in Crystal Reports does this for you.

The way in which data is sorted depends on how you specify the sort as well as on the type of data that you want to sort. You can sort data in ascending order or descending order. In general, ascending means lowest to highest, ...