HP Intelligent Management Center Standard Software Platform - Manual (Page 131)

Formatting data
At this point in creating a report, you may want to do some basic formatting.
Perhaps you would like to change the font size and style of a text object used
as a title. Or, if you have a number field, such as a sales figure, you might
want to place a dollar sign before the number or change the number of
decimal places displayed.
Record selection
Record selection, the task of paring down the data to include only the data
required for your report, is a crucial step in report creation. You will rarely
want a listing of all the information in a database. Most often you will be
interested in only the sales in a given time period or for a certain product,
and so on. For example, a sales report may be designed to only include
sales from one product line for the last calendar month.
Grouping, sorting, and summarizing data
Once a basic report is created, you will want to organize the data by grouping
related information, sorting individual records, summarizing, subtotaling, and
grand totaling.
Grouping records
To organize the data, you may want to group related data together. For
example, after grouping a customer list by region, you might divide the list
into regional groups. That way, a sales manager for one region could quickly
locate the appropriate region group and focus exclusively on the customers
within that region. See
Grouping data .
Sorting records
Crystal Reports allows you to specify the order in which you want the records
on your report displayed. For example, after grouping by region, you might
Crystal Reports 2008 SP3 User's Guide 131
6 Introduction to Reporting
Creating a new report