HANDS-ON (Report Design Environment)

Adding guidelines

Seagate Crystal Reports provides guidelines to help you accurately place objects on your report. Guidelines are nonprinting lines that you can place anywhere in the Design and Preview Tabs to aid in alignment. You can toggle the visibility of the guidelines on and off in two ways:

1.Using the two commands on the View menu, GUIDELINES IN

DESIGN and GUIDELINES IN PREVIEW. Search for Guidelines in Design command and Guidelines in Preview command in Seagate Crystal Reports online Help.

2.Using the two options, Show Guidelines in Design and Show Guidelines in Preview on the Layout Tab of the File Options dialog box. Search for File Options dialog box in Seagate Crystal Reports online Help.

Seagate Crystal Reports inserts guidelines automatically in some situations:

●Whenever you insert a field or formula field in your report, the program automatically creates a guideline at the left edge of the field frame and snaps the field and field title to it.

●If you summarize a field, the program snaps the summary to the same guideline to assure proper alignment.

●When you right-click the shaded areas to the left of a section and choose the ARRANGE LINES command, the program automatically creates one or more horizontal guidelines in the section and snaps the fields to them.

There may be times that you want to insert guidelines manually.

Click this ruler to activate a vertical guideline.

Click this ruler to activate a horizontal guideline.

Moving guidelines

Deleting guidelines

Each guideline is attached to an arrowhead on its originating ruler.

Drag the guideline arrowhead to the desired position.

Each guideline is attached to an arrowhead on its originating ruler.

Drag the guideline arrowhead away from the ruler.

NOTE: With the Snap to Grid option toggled on you will only be able to insert or move guidelines in grid increments. To get the full power of movement with guidelines, toggle the Snap to Grid

option off using the Layout Tab in the File Options dialog box. Search for File Options dialog box in Seagate Crystal Reports online Help.

Positioning

objects with guidelines

Guidelines have a snap property that automatically snaps objects to them. That is, objects will connect to the guidelines as positioning devices.

An object can snap to a horizontal guideline on its top, bottom, or horizontal midline (the line that bisects the object horizontally).

Resizing

objects using guidelines

Snapping

objects with two guidelines

When you snap one or more objects to guidelines on two sides (top and bottom, or right and left), you can resize the object(s) by dragging either or both of the guidelines. This can be especially helpful if you need to resize a number of objects similarly at the same time.

This is a two step process.

1.First you have to snap the object(s) to two guidelines.

2.Then you have to drag a guideline to resize the object(s).

You may have two or more objects that you want to resize and they are either the same size (height or width) or different sizes. The process for resizing with two guidelines is the same for either case.

Begin by creating a guideline and snapping one side of the object to that guideline.

2 Create a second guideline to the right of the object. It should not be touching the object.

! Now click the object to activate the sizing handles.

4 Drag the resizing handle over to the second guideline.

The object will snap to the second guideline.

#Repeat Steps 2 through 4 for every additional object you want to snap to both guidelines.

$If the objects are not yet the size you want them, drag either or both of the guidelines until the objects are the correct size.