Often, when adding Crystal reports to your system, you’ll find that userswant the same basic report grouped different ways, like sales reports bycustomer state or salesman or region, and so on. Don’t code that reportover and over–use one Crystal report to do all of them.

Add a formula to your report–lets call it Group1 for this example. Thenadd a group to your report. Instead of grouping on a database field, groupon the formula Group1. Now, at runtime when you want to execute the reportgrouped by customer state, for example, change the value of formula Group1to the name of the database field you want to group on. Using the Crystalobject library in VB, the code might look something like this:

 rept.FormulaFields.Item("Group1").Text = "{Customer.State}"

(The code using the OCX or Crystal designer will be similar)

Then run your report–presto! Your report is grouped by customer state.