This dashboard allows you to perform competitive analysis across three key areas: cost structure, market share and growth trends. View head-to-head comparisons of each line item in your income statement. Visualize your slice of the market versus your main competitors. And perform ad hoc analysis to see growth trends for you, your competitors, and the industry.

This profitability model allows you to create "what-if" scenarios by modifying sales growth rate and all other relevant accounts measured as a percentage of total sales. This example, built with fictitious data, depicts the most relevant accounts of a profit and loss statement, and shows the impact of changes on net income. The results change immediately, allowing you to create endless what-if scenarios.

The report designer and the .NET Winform, and .NET Webform viewers have a parameter panel so that parameter values can be set without refreshing data. Parameters used are displayed on the panel so that report consumers can easily see them, make changes, and have the new values applied directly to the saved data. Another solution to reduce report count and IT/Dev support cost.

View Demo: Sort and Filter

Create stunning visualizations by adding dynamic charts, graphics and even video files to your reports. A wide variety of flexible data presentation options are now available through Flash. Flash (SWF) files can be integrated into your report and report data can be shared with SWF via Flashvars for compelling, interactive, and information-rich reports. The SWF files can quickly be embedded in the report or linked via a website saving IT and Development time.

Add business-critical information to your reports without coding. Summary, variance, and any other customer calculations can be inserted into a crosstab row or a column – especially useful for reports that benefit from a table structure such as financial reports. The crosstab table structure makes reports much faster to build and maintain. This feature also provides powerful benefits to crosstab-based charts since custom formulas in the crosstab can be visualized within the charts.

View Demo: Crosstabs

Expand your access to data over the web. Integration with various web services can be difficult and complex due to a wide variety of implementation types. The new data driver offers additional web access to web services by providing support for RPC encoding of SOAP messages, SSL-secured web servers, as well as a working compatibility with the WS-Security standard. It adapts to custom logon requirements such as email addresses or user/password. Developers can combine the flexibility of XML and Web Services with report formatting and visualization to deliver reports linking report data to sophisticated interactive data mashups such as integration with third party mapping systems.

The salesforce.com driver included with Crystal Reports 2008 allows for easy access to complete customer data - turning it into actionable business information. Reports that use a salesforce.com driver will refresh when deployed to crystalreports.com.