Crystal Reports for Rational Application Developer Designer Guide

Grouping by the first letter of a customer name

You might want to break your data into groups based on the first letter of the customer name. To do this requires the use of a formula.
Do not worry if you are unfamiliar with formulas. This text will show you what formula you need here and how to enter it.
In this example, you create a formula to extract the first letter of each customer's name. Then, you group the data using the field from the formula as the sort-and-group-by field. The program sorts the data based on the first letter of each customer name and starts a new group whenever that letter changes.