Anticlue

Drill Downs, the best of both worlds.

To be frank, sometimes there is just an enormous amount of detail contained within a report. Now there are detail freaks, like myself, who really get into analyzing and comprehending the detail. But generally a report is to be informative, and yet give the user access to the necessary information. This is where the drill down report mechanism really reveals its power.

How about we create a new report from the Northwind database? In our detail section, use the company name, order date, order id, product name, quantity, discount, and unit price. Because we have several fields, let’s use landscape for our print option. In our report, we can group by company name in ascending order, order date by week, and order id. Once we preview, we should see the following:

So we have all of our details nicely displayed, but to be honest it iss a little too much information right now. Why don’t we hide the details? In the design tab, right click in the detail section. Select Hide (Drill Down OK), now preview the report. To the left of the page, one will notice a group tree. This is a neat feature that is also included in the crystal report viewer active X control, used for viewing crystal reports. The report reader can drill down to the interesting level of data contained within the report.