Crystal Reports: Graph with Different Colors for Positive and Negative Values

How hard is it to create special graphs in Crystal Reports. In my opinion a tool like Crystal Reports lacks the flexibility of Excel, but this does not mean one can not create nice graphs.

In this case I created a graph with different colors for positive and negative values. Crystal Reports version 2011 does not do this automatically. You need to help it.

I started with creating a straightforward vertical bar graph.

and changed it in to this:

Apart from some minor changes like removing the legend and adding data labels, I only had to do one major change: adding conditions to the Color Highlight tab.

In the Chart Expert I picked the tab Color Highlight:

I created two conditions for values below and above the zero line, as you can see.

In this example I experimented with the Access Northwind database. You can download the file here:

www.walmar.nl/zips/StackedBarAboveBelow.zip

You can also download the file through this link:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B7HgkOwFZtdZVmhRQUZFM28yc1U&usp=sharing