Creating an excel like spread sheet calculations by overlapping 2 cross tabs in Crystal reports.
Sometime it is necessary to create a cross tab to subtract the 2 internal columns from the last column for example direct cost and administrative cost have to be subtracted from the last column i.e. sales amount column, In crystal reports cross tab which usually summed the columns in cross tabs may seem impossible at first.
There are several options to tackle this issue 1 may be to create a manual cross tab. We experimented with 2 cross tab overlapping each other. In 1 cross tab the same data in the two internal columns was multiplied by -1 and last column i.e. sale amount was multiplied by +1 and hence we can achieve the objective in total for the rowHowever if users don’t want to the negative signs with amounts and also we have to add up the respective columns at bottom, then it may seem that we cannot achieve this Crystal Reports cross tab object.
But fortunately we achieved this by adding another cross tab on top of the first cross tab report with same data source. In the first cross tab two internal columns were suppressed whereas last column was shown.
In the second cross tab we showed the 2 internal columns and moreover no column in the second cross tab was multiplied with -1, lastly the total column in second sub report was suppressed, in other words cross tab were showing the internal columns from the second cross tab and sales amount total column from first cross tab.
The data presented perfectly, though it needs some alignment and of column sizes etc. The purpose of writing this post was to show just an example how flexible and mature isCrystalreports in tackling infinite issues of database reporting.
