Crystal Reports: the very basics

Introduction:

Crystal Reports is a report generating program, popularly called report writer, which allows users to create a variety of reports from different sort of data sources. It was originally developed by Crystal Services Inc. as a report writer for their accounting software. It is currently under the ownership of German software corporation SAP.

It was bundled into Microsoft Visual Studio from versions 2003 to 2008. Since the 2010 version of visual studio, it is available as a separate download from SAP website as free software.

Supported Data sources:

Crystal Reports supports a variety of databases such as MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft Sybase and PostgreSQL. Spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel are also accessible via crystal reports. Data can also be fed through text files and XML files.

Further details and demo project will be added soon.

References:

         i.            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Reports

       ii.            Various online websites