Hi,I'm currently using version 8.5 of Crystal Reports tio develop several financial reports. I use the Report Distribution Expert to distribute the reports and the. Crystal Reports 8. Flow Meter Installation Standards. 5 continues to be the product of choice for adding powerful reporting capabilities to your applications. Hi Everyone,I really need some help. I have a VB 6 application with reports designed using Crystal Reports 8.5. The VB 6 application is running fine except the.

Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer Edition Free Software and Serial Download Structured Query Language (SQL), the standard means of specifying what information you want to extract from a relational database, was designed by programmers for programmers. In order to extract values from tables with straight SQL, you have to formulate convoluted statements from field names and cryptic keywords--which doesn't usually leave time available for making business decisions. The makers of Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer Edition understand that writing SQL statements isn't everyone's favorite thing to do, so Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer Edition provides tools that make it easier to extract meaningful information--in the form of charts, tables, and calculated values--from the contents of database management systems like Oracle, Sybase, and Microsoft SQL Server. The developers of Crystal Reports also knew that some people love to manipulate data at a low level with SQL and other programmers' tools, so the package contains goodies for them, as well. As is often the case with enterprise solutions, this product consists of two separate applications.

The core package, Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer, is for accessing the contents of database tables and generating reports based on their contents. Wizards make this process extremely easy. You just specify the database you want to operate on, which can be local or accessible via an Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) link. Having done that, you can choose the tables and fields you want to extract values from. The wizards make it easy to specify which fields should serve as headers, and simplify the process of doing calculations on extracted values. In a report on the monthly sales of a multinational chain of stores, for example, you could group individual stores' sales figures by country, and calculate total sales figures for each country and for the chain as a whole. Wizards also handle formatting, so it's pretty easy to get neat-looking reports customized with your organizational logo.

Wizards aren't limited to tabular reports: you can use them to generate reports that reveal details in response to clicks (so-called drill-down reports) and personalized form letters for mass mailings. Going beyond the wizards, Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer offers a tool for visually creating joins among tables (by which you can consolidate the fields in multiple tables into a single report).

It also makes it relatively easy to build SQL queries, mostly by exchanging syntax memorization in favor of a logically organized set of expandable trees from which you choose the commands you want. With SQL queries, you can do things like find the maximum value in a field across many records, or perform complicated text-searches on the contents of text fields.

Managers and others who have been taught to revere database queries as a black art known only to database administrators will be delighted by the ease with which they can create reports to support their business decisions. The other product in this package is Crystal Enterprise 8, which is capable of taking report documents from Crystal Reports and distilling them into publications that it then serves to network users.