Crystal Reports® 2008 For Dummies®

Chapter 15. Enhancing Reports with Charts

In This Chapter

• Creating charts

• Choosing the right kind of chart

• Finding out about the chart layout choices

• Placing charts in the right spot

• Troubleshooting chart format and placement problems

The essential purpose of a report is to communicate meaning to its readers. Lines of text and columns of numbers undeniably communicate meaning, but sometimes they don't do so as forcefully as a visual image. The right picture can sometimes be worth much more than a thousand words.

Crystal Reports delivers information visually in several ways. In several of the previous chapters, I told how to include a company logo in a report. You can use the same technique to include a wide variety of graphical images. In Chapter 16, I discuss adding a visual dimension to geographical information with maps. In this chapter, I tell you how to add charts to a report. Charts are probably the most popular method used to convey an overview of data that might otherwise be difficult to interpret. Trends in the data clamor to be recognized. Anomalies are much more noticeable than they would be, buried in a column of numbers. If your report contains numerical values of any kind, it would probably benefit from the inclusion of one or more charts.

Using Chart Expert

Type tab

The first tab on the left when you first open Chart Expert is the Type tab (see Figure 15-1).

From this tab, you ...