SAP Crystal Reporting

SAP Crystal Reports

SAP Crystal Reports was an early reporting software created in the 1980s. It was subsequently acquired by BusinessObjects and eventually joined the SAP portfolio when SAP acquired BusinessObjects. SAP has continued to develop the product and has released the latest version SAP Crystal Reports 2020.

SAP Crystal Reports

SAP Crystal Reports helps business users analyze data by creating richly formatted, multi-page reports from virtually any data source, delivered in more than a dozen formats. Such formats can be used to generate customer or partner facing assets such as custom invoices, billing statements, letters, sales and operations reports, and promotion campaigns with drag-and-drop interfaces.

While SAP Crystal Reports is marketed to small and medium-sized businesses, it can be an easy reporting tool for enterprises too.

SAP Crystal Reports Benefits

SAP Crystal Reports makes it easy for business users to create reports easily while also ensuring security and access rights. Some of the advantages it provides are:

Ability to easily analyze and report on business data by creating intuitive reports and dashboards with drag-and-drop simplicity
Security settings for reporting environments by defining user rights to access, view, refresh, export, or print reports
Insights to understand business and share the facts to provide ready-to-consume information, as reports and dashboards, to colleagues, suppliers, partners, and customers.

SAP Crystal Reports files are saved with extension “.rpt”

Reporting and analytics are fields where many vendors are coming up with innovations such as pre-built reports, automation, and intuitive user interfaces. Apart from SAP BusinessObjects, Qlik, Pyramid Analytics, and apexanalyticsalso provide rich reporting and analytics capabilities.

While such tools are a boon to business users, there is increasing recognition that what comes out of data depends on data quality. Hence, many SAP companies are embarking on data management projects ranging from master data governance, intelligent data cleansing, enabling data virtualization to analyze data rather than making static copies, etc. This also becomes critical when the security, access control, and compliance requirements come into play.

SAP Crystal Reports is a useful tool in the reporting portfolio for low value reports. However, the demands for analytics in today’s complex data volumes may be better met with more sophisticated solutions.

Integrate Crystal Reports with SAP NetWeaver BI for Enhanced Report Formatting

Published: 01/January/2009

Reading time: 25 mins

Find out which type of data connectivity is available for SAP NetWeaver BI and Crystal Reports. Then see how you can use the BW MDX connectivity to design a report in Crystal Reports that includes groups, hierarchies, and net sales data from SAP NetWeaver BI. Key Concept Crystal Reports allows you to use your SAP...…
- SAP Business Application Studio
Set Up Intuitive and Automated Reporting Functionality with Crystal Reports

Published: 21/January/2010

Reading time: 17 mins

Discover a strategy for configuring and developing Crystal Reports for your organization’s SAP BusinessObjects GRC solutions, such as SAP BusinessObjects Process Control. Walk through key installation requirements and configuration steps for your SAP BusinessObjects GRC solutions related to the SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise server, and identify key configuration settings that need to be put into place....…
Share Data Access with SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise 4.0 on Top of SAP NetWeaver BW

Published: 04/April/2011

Reading time: 12 mins

Learn about some of the new capabilities of SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise 4.0 and how you can connect the tool to your SAP NetWeaver BW data. Key Concept SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise 4.0 provides end users with capabilities for formatted reporting. SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise 4.0 is a fully redesigned report designer...…
Combine SAP NetWeaver BW, Xcelsius, and Crystal Reports for Personalized Reporting

Published: 19/August/2009

Reading time: 15 mins

Find out how you can combine Xcelsius 2008 and Crystal Reports 2008 with your SAP NetWeaver BW system to show aggregated data in your dashboard and then navigate to the detailed data in Crystal Reports. By combining these two applications, you can show highly summarized data to your executives and managers, while allowing analysts to...…
Give Managers Detailed, Visual Dashboards for Improved Decision Making

Published: 14/August/2009

Reading time: 20 mins

Find out how you can use Xcelsius, SAP BusinessObjects Live Office, SAP NetWeaver BW, and Crystal Reports to provide compelling data visualizations and dashboards. For example, you can add simple drop-down selection boxes to your charts to allow users to easily manipulate the data views in real time. Key Concept With the current BI roadmap,...…
Deciphering the Significance Behind the New Crystal Reports Releases

Published: 24/June/2011

Reading time: 5 mins

Two new releases of SAP BusinessObjects Crystal Reports point to more significant future changes in the software. The future of BusinessObjects Crystal Reports is two-pronged, and each option offers different messages for users of the popular software. Crystal Reports 2011, part of the BusinessObjects BI 4.0 release that may be coming as soon as July...…
How to Change Data Sources in Crystal Reports 2011

Published: 15/July/2013

Reading time: 7 mins

Adam Getz shows how to change the data source for a Crystal Report — such as migrating data from a test environment to a production environment — using either the Crystal Reports Designer interface or the Central Management Console without changing any other aspects of the report. Key Concept A data source is any organized...…
- SAP BOBJ
What’s Coming in 2017 for SAP BusinessObjects BI? Q&A with SAP Mentor Tammy Powlas

Published: 01/December/2016

Reading time: 25 mins

The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) 4.2 platform offers a number of innovations to users. What should you expect from SAP BI in 2017 for products including SAP BusinessObjects Lumira and SAP BusinessObjects Cloud? SAPinsider BI 2017 speaker Tammy Powlas answered user questions on what the future holds for SAP BI solutions and how you…
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Special Report: Implementing SAP HANA – An End-to-End Perspective

Published: 17/October/2012

Reading time: 69 mins

In this exclusive special report, get an in-depth, step-by-step look at the aspects of implementing BI solutions on SAP HANA. Gain insight into how ETL integrates with SAP HANA and how SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 analyzes and visualizes the data stored in SAP HANA. Key Concept SAP HANA modeling is a process whereby a developer...…
Give Dashboard Users the Ability to Export Data to Excel at Run Time

Published: 30/December/2013

Reading time: 10 mins

Learn how to leverage SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise, together with OpenDocument, to export the data points in SAP Dashboards to Excel at run time, thus improving stakeholder access to data and maximizing the organization’s investment in SAP BusinessObjects tool suite. Key Concept SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise is the long-term successor to Crystal Reports...…