Operation Manual

Sorting, Grouping, and Totaling
Grouping data
10
Crystal Reports User’s Guide 173
Related topics:
• “Grouping data in intervals” on page 180
• “Creating group headers” on page 197
Creating custom groups
Usually data is sorted based on the values from a field in the report.
Sometimes, however, you may not want to group data based on the values
found in one of the fields on your report. For example:
• The field you want to group on does not exist.
For example, your report may contain a City field and a State field, but no
Country field, although you need to group by country.
• The field exists, but you do not want to group on the values in that field.
For example, you may have a Color field on your report that includes
specific color names (Logan Green, Sky Blue, Emerald Green, Navy Blue,
and so on) but you want all shades of each color to appear as a single
group (Greens, Blues, Reds, and so on). In this case you can build custom
groups and manually assign the records you want to be in each group.
• The field exists, but you want to select specific values or ranges of values
for each group.
For example, you might want one group to contain records where gross
sales are less than a certain value, a second group where gross sales
are greater than a certain value, and a final group where gross sales fall
between two values. In this case, you can build your groups using the
same range of selection facilities that are available to you for building
record selection queries.
Specified order grouping provides a solution to these custom sorting and
grouping challenges. It enables you to create both the customized groups that
will appear on a report and the records that each group will contain. The only
limitation is that a record can be assigned to only one group.
To follow a tutorial where you create custom groups to rank customers by the
amount of business they did in the previous year, see “Grouping data in
intervals” on page 180.
u
To create a custom group
1. On the Insert menu, click Group.
The Insert Group dialog box appears.
2. Select the field you want the data grouped by from the top drop-down list.