I haven't used them, but still cross tabs sounds like the simplest way...you don't need to display totals (do you, I don't build cross-tabs, so could be wrong).
If cross-tabs don't work for you, there is no easy way in Crystal that I know of to get this done. it could probably be done with formulas, but for all that work, I would just do in SQL.
Crystal isn't the best reporting tool out there, and it isn't the worse...in most cases it is just as simple and just as complex as the others. Sure, Excel is can reformat the data more simply, but you can't use it to write a report or to connect to a database and retrieve data...
Not knocking Crystal or Excel, they just do things differently, as they were designed to accomplish different goals.