Report 'Suite' from scratch - advice

[D5T]

Hi All,

New to the community but suspect will now be a frequent visitor.
Basically I'm a beginner with Crystal & have been given the task of creating a suite of reports for an IT helpdesk (running Landesk)with links to Crystal, 11 I believe.

I'm looking for advice on the best approach I could take towards this task - any tips, suggestions etc.1 tip I've already had was to ditch anything & everything that already existed & start from the ground up.

My end goal eventually is to have a suite of reports for Senior Management, team leaders & at some point the analysts themselves. 1 thing I want throughout is consistency so that any report from "my" library is obvious. however that's clearly an aesthetics angle.

Quite a scary thing to be approaching to be honest so any advice GREATLY appreciated.
All the best

 

[Charliy]

I'm a big fan of creating User Defined Functions so that all reports can do things the same way (calculate elapsed time, etc.) It's also easier to maintain, if something changes you just update the function in all reports rather than search for formulas that need to be updated.

I have a report called blank.rpt, which I use as my starting point instead of creating a blank report. I have my functions in there, and can have margins preset, standard headers, etc.

My one design tip is to always assume your report is going o be placed in a three-ring binder, and allow space on the left margin so the data won't be lost if the paper is punched.