Operation Manual

Printing, Exporting, and Viewing Reports
Distributing reports
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Crystal Reports User’s Guide 385
4. Choose the appropriate settings, and then click OK.
Your fax application appears, prompting you to select a cover page and
to fill in the appropriate fax information.
Exporting a report
Finished reports can be exported to a number of popular formats, such as
spreadsheet, word processor, HTML, ODBC, and common data interchange
formats. This makes the distribution of information easier. For example, you
may want to use the report data to project trends in a spreadsheet package or
to enhance the presentation of data in a desktop publishing package.
Note: Crystal Reports lets you insert objects anywhere on the report page.
When you export to formats such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and
HTML, however, objects that you placed between lines are moved to the
closest line in the output. To alleviate the formatting problems this behavior
could cause, it is recommended that you use Guidelines when designing your
reports. For more information, see “Designing with guidelines” on page 246.
The exporting process requires you to specify a format and a destination. The
format determines the file type, and the destination determines where the file is
located.
Export format types
The export formats supported by Crystal Reports can be broadly categorized
in two groups: page-based formats and record-based formats.
Page-based formats tend to produce a more exact output. The emphasis of
these formats is layout representation and formatting. Formatting refers to
attributes such as font style, text color, text alignment, background color, and
so on. Layout refers to object position, object size, and the relationship
between these attributes and other objects. Depending on the format you
choose, it may not be possible for the program to preserve all layout and
formatting perfectly, but page-based formats, in general, preserve these
properties as closely as possible.
With record-based formats, the emphasis is on data rather than the layout
and formatting. However, in some formats—such as Microsoft Excel - Data
only—you will notice that some formatting is exported. Some of the record-
based formats are only data-exchange formats.
Adobe Acrobat (PDF)
Adobe Acrobat format is a page-based format. The exported documents are
intended for printing and redistribution. Acrobat format will export both layout
and formatting in a manner that is consistent with how the report looks on the