Crystal Reports Smart Tags Demonstrating the Benefits and Uses of Smart Tags

Overview

The purpose of this white paper is to demonstrate how you can use Microsoft’s new smart tag technology to add powerful end user interaction with Crystal Reports objects that are embedded in Microsoft Office XP documents. End users who receive a document with Crystal Reports Smart Tags can refresh the report object’s data within the Office XP document itself and they can choose to view the original report. With Crystal Reports Smart Tags the report data available in the Office XP document is linked to the original Crystal Report, providing one, consistent source for information for your entire enterprise.

Contents

WHAT IS A SMART TAG ...... 1 CRYSTAL REPORTS SMART TAGS BENEFITS...... 1 HOW CRYSTAL REPORTS USES SMART TAGS ...... 2 USING CRYSTAL REPORTS SMART TAGS WITH OFFICE XP DOCUMENTS...... 2 SETTING UP CRYSTAL REPORTS SMART TAGS ...... 2 SCENARIO ...... 3 CONCLUSION...... 8

What is a Smart Tag

Microsoft Office XP smart tags are small, XML-based pop-up icons that quickly enable end user access to powerful context-specific features within certain Office XP applications. Smart tags are a new Office XP feature in Microsoft Word 2002 and Microsoft Excel 2002, and are available in Microsoft Outlook 2002 when Word is used as the e-mail editor.

Smart tags have two components, a recognizer that can identify certain types of text or objects in a document as belonging to the smart tag, and an action that provides one or more commands that can be executed. The Office XP document contains the XML data that identifies the recognizer for a particular smart tag and points to locally stored smart tag code for the recognizer to provide that particular smart tag’s list of available commands. Of particular note is that smart tags themselves do not place any code into a document and cannot be used to spread unauthorized code via Office documents.

Client side smart tag code is easily installed and registered on client computers. Smart tags support digital signatures and can be deployed and secured via policy templates. However, if smart tags are turned off by the user in an Office XP application or via policy no smart tag indicators are displayed.

Crystal Reports Smart Tags Benefits

Crystal Decisions leverages the Office XP smart tag technology to create and distribute smart tags for use by Crystal Reports 9 and Office XP. Smart tags empower your end users by simplifying the distribution of key portions of Crystal Reports using familiar Office XP applications. Sharing is made easy; users simply copy and paste the report objects they want to share. Office XP documents

containing Crystal Reports Smart Tags contain live data linked to the original report, so it is always reliable and accurate.

Administration of this feature involves installing and registering the Crystal Reports Smart Tags code on all client computers; no other Crystal components are required for end users to view, refresh, and share report objects.

How Crystal Reports Uses Smart Tags

Crystal Reports Smart Tags allow you to integrate key report objects into Microsoft Office XP documents for immediate sharing and refreshing. The report objects that can be recognized by Crystal Reports Smart Tags are charts, text objects, or field objects. Refer to the table below for details about which report objects can be pasted into the Office XP applications that support smart tags.

Office XP Application Smart Tag Action Crystal Reports Object Type

Word 2002 View Chart

Refresh Text Object

Field Object

Excel 2002 View Text Object

Refresh Field Object

Outlook 2002 View Chart

Refresh (only when creating a message) Text Object

Field Object

Using Crystal Reports Smart Tags with Office XP Documents

Report developers insert a link to a Crystal report object in Office XP documents by simply copying the report object in the original Crystal Report (using the Copy Smart Tag right click option) and pasting the report object into a Word document, Excel work sheet, or Outlook e-mail message. The report object and its smart tag’s recognizer XML data are embedded in the Office XP document.

When an end user opens an Office XP document containing a Crystal report object it displays the smart tag indicator, usually a colored dotted line under the object. When the end user hovers over the report object the smart tag icon displays. The end user can click on the smart tag icon and can select to view the original Crystal Report from which the data was taken in an .asp or .jsp page (determined by the original report’s smart tag options), or to refresh the data displayed in the report object in the Office XP document.

Setting Up Crystal Reports Smart Tags

To use Crystal Reports Smart Tags with report objects Crystal Reports provides defaults for Smart Tag options on the Smart Tag tab of the Crystal Reports 9 Options dialog box. If Crystal Enterprise Report Application Server 9 is installed an .asp page for viewing the report is created by default at the location

specified by the Smart Tag options defaults; if not you need to manually create an .asp or .jsp file for the report.

In addition, end users who do not have Crystal Reports installed on their machine must install the Crystal Reports Smart Tag code, which is contained in the file smarttag.dll, to act on Crystal Reports Smart Tags in Office XP documents that contain Crystal report objects. In this case if the end user opens an Office XP document containing a Crystal Reports Smart Tag the smart tag does not display any report options. Instead, the end user will be given an option to install the smart tag code. If the user elects to do so the smarttag.dll file is downloaded from http://support.crystaldecisions.com/ and will prompt the user to install. No other user action is required and once installed the Crystal Reports smart tag displays the report options.

The smarttag.dll file can be deployed via policy templates, or with Systems Management Server. You can also download the file to a network server and use administrative policies to redirect users to the server on your network if your users are working behind a firewall.

Note: If Crystal Reports is installed on the client computer the Crystal Reports Smart Tag code for Office XP is also installed, automatically. Scenario

The Xtreme Mountain bike Company holds a contest every quarter and rewards the salesperson with the greatest quarterly sales.

At the end of each quarter the Sales Manager views her “Employee Sales Report” using Crystal Reports. This quarter she sees that Ms. King has the greatest sales numbers. The Sales Manager right clicks the graph in the report and chooses Copy Smart Tag (Fig. 1.1).

The Sales Manager right clicks the graph in the report and chooses Copy Smart Tag.

Fig. 1.1

The Sales Manager then opens a new e-mail message to Ms. King in Outlook XP and pastes the copied smart tag for the graph into it (Fig. 1.2).

Note the smart tag indicator (dotted purple line) under the graph, indicating that the Crystal Reports Smart Tag recognizes the copied graph as a Crystal Reports Smart Tag

The Sales Manager pastes the copied smart tag for the graph into the e-mail message.

Fig. 1.2

The Sales Manager sends the e-mail to Ms. King, who opens the message using Outlook 2002. Ms. King sees the Crystal Reports Smart Tag when she hovers over the Crystal Report graph (Fig. 1.3).

Ms. King sees the Crystal Reports Smart Tag when she hovers over the Crystal Report graph.

Fig. 1.3

If Ms. King has not yet installed the Crystal Report Smart Tag she will only see the “Check for New Actions” smart tag option (Fig. 1.4). Once Ms. King clicks on the smart tag option it will bring her to the Crystal Decisions support web site for her to install the Crystal Reports Smart Tag.

If Ms. King has not yet installed the Crystal Report Smart Tag she will only see the “Check for New Actions” smart tag option.

Fig. 1.4

If Ms. King or her administrator had installed the Crystal Reports Smart Tag previously she would see the “View Report” option, as well as the default smart tag options (Fig. 1.5).

Note that Outlook does not support the “Refresh” option on the receiver side for charts.

If Ms. King had installed the Crystal Reports Smart Tag previously she would see the “View Report” option.

Fig. 1.5

Ms. King selects to view the report, which opens the original report in a browser through the DHTML viewer and enables her to view and analyze the report (Fig. 1.6).

Ms. King selects to view the report, which opens the original report in a browser through the DHTML viewer.

Fig. 1.6

Conclusion

Crystal Decision’s use of Microsoft Office XP’s new smart tag technology empowers end users to share and interact with Crystal Reports data in the environment they know best – familiar Microsoft Office XP applications such as Word, Excel and Outlook. This whitepaper demonstrates the benefits and use of the Crystal Reports Smart Tag.

For further information and technical specifications for this and other Crystal Reports features please refer to Crystal Decisions Dev Zone: http://www.crystaldecisions.com/products/dev_zone/default.asp.

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