Creating a Date in Crystal Reports
Overview
Create a Date Formula
Learners are expected to have a working knowledge of how to create a simple Crystal report.
Crystal Reports is a business tool that is used to create letters and reports. The Crystal reports tool retrieves stored data, making it both a developer and a viewer, and must be connected to a data source to retrieve information. Although Crystal requires the user to acquire a level of competence to produce reliable data output, the application has some standard functionality that can be used to manipulate the data as required. This lesson is a beginner’s level introduction on how to build a formula using the tool. The learner will be shown how to take a date field that has a date result associated to it and use that information to make a new date field by adding or subtracting the desired number of days that need to be reflected. The learner for this lesson is expected to have some Crystal report experience. The learner should know the basic areas of the reports tool such as tables, fields, and how to add fields. At the end of the lesson, the learner should be able to create a date field that will display the exact target date desired based on the number of days different from the starting date. They should also be able to format the date using the format field function, understanding the difference between allowing the date to remain in its default format and changing it as requested or required by the end-user. Although this demonstration uses a letter as an example, the same method can be used in any report situation that presents the same opportunity to use an existing date field.