In the past few years the ability to report on geographical data has become a task that does not require an army of developers to accomplish. Before the mapping functionality in Crystal Reports and other services, such as Google maps and the new Geography data types in SQL Server 2008, developers spent a great deal of time working to visualize geographical data on a map.

Crystal Reports has had mapping functionality built in for the past few versions. This functionality is provided from a third-party company named MapInfo. Currently, Crystal Reports contains a limited number of map types, but additional map types and "layers" can be purchased from MapInfo.

The default mapping functionality is also limited in what types of geographical data can be interpreted. Currently the default functionality can interpret state names/abbreviations, country names/abbreviations and limited city names. Additional functionality to support interpretation of geographical data, such as postal code and latitude/longitude points, can be purchased from MapInfo or a different tool can be used to render a map as an image and include it in the report, which we will discuss later in this article.