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Crystal Reports is a business intelligence application used to design and generate reports from a wide range of data sources. Several other applications, such as Microsoft Visual Studio, bundle an OEM version of Crystal Reports as a general purpose reporting tool. Crystal Reports became the de facto report writer when Microsoft released it with Visual Basic.

Report designer

Users install Crystal Reports on a computer and use it to select specific rows and columns from a table of compatible data (see "Supported data sources" below). Users can then arrange the data on the report in the format needed. Once the report layout is complete it is saved as a file with the extension RPT. A report can be rerun anytime by reopening the RPT file and 'refreshing' the data. If the source data has been updated then the refreshed report will reflect those updates. The report can then be previewed on the screen, printed onto paper or exported to one of several different file formats such as PDF, Excel, text, CSV or other.

Report formats can vary from a simple column of values to layouts featuring pie charts, bar charts, cross-tab summary tables and nested subreports. Crystal Reports is designed for "presentation quality" reports so there are many options for enhanced formatting.

Supported data sources

Accessible data sources include the following:

• Databases such as Sybase, IBM DB2, Ingres, Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Interbase and Oracle
• Btrieve
• Spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel
• Text files
• XML files
• Groupware applications such as Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWise
• Any other data source accessible through a web service, ODBC, JDBC or OLAP

Development

Crystal Reports comes integrated with Visual Studio. Crystal Reports allows Java developers to build applications with Crystal Reports components. 

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