One of my customers asked if I could help them with a formula. The formula is found in article c2012665 in the Business Objects knowledge base and it converts a decimal number into fraction format. In other words it should convert .75 into 3/4 as a string. The formula used a clever loop but it had 3 problems:

1) If the input was an integer you would still get the fraction, but with a 0 on top.
2) If the input was between 0 and 1 (like .75) you would get the integer 0 in the output.
3) The formula was in BASIC syntax which makes it hard for many users to modify.

So I converted it to Crystal syntax and cleaned up the output. The result is below.

Note that this formula is set to round the decimal value to 4 places (see the 3rd line below). You can round it to more or less if you choose. But if you are using v8.5 you MUST round to no more then 2 decimal places or Crystal will start to error because there are limits on the number of iterations that v8.5 can do.

NumberVar raw :={your.field};
NumberVar wholeNumber := int(raw);
NumberVar decInput := round (raw - Wholenumber , 4);
NumberVar numerator :=1;
NumberVar denominator :=1;
NumberVar decimalFraction := numerator / denominator ;
Do ((If decimalFraction < decInput
Then numerator := numerator + 1
Else ( denominator := denominator + 1 ;
numerator := truncate(decInput * denominator)))
;decimalFraction := numerator / denominator )
While decimalFraction <> decInput;

(if wholenumber > 0
then totext(wholeNumber,0,"") + " "
else "")
&
(if numerator > 0
then totext(numerator,0 , "") & "/" & totext(denominator,0 , "")
else "")

Added 2/5/08:

The same customer later requested that the value be rounded to the nearest 1/16th. This can be done by using formula 22 on my Formulas page that allows you to round a number to the nearest ‘x’ value. You can either use a separate formula for the rounding or you can do the whole calculation in the first line of this formula. If you do the rounding in a separate formula you would use that rounding formula as your input at the top of this formula.