After 8 years I have finally purchased a new version of Crystal Reports. I skipped the last two upgrades because there wasn’t enough to justify the cost of the upgrade. But there are several new features in CR 2016. Here is what’s new:

Formatting conditions for lines and boxes:
Six new formula condition buttons to control formatting properties of lines and boxes based on data or parameter conditions:

Suppression
Style
Width
Border color
Fill Color (Boxes Only)
Drop Shadow (Boxes Only)

Vertical Alignment Control:
Before now, all objects were top-aligned. Now there is a control that allows you to set vertical alignment to top, center or bottom. And there is a formula condition button that allows you to change the alignment based on data or parameter conditions. The function constants are:
crTopAligned
crCenteredVertically
crBottomAligned

Functions:
GetValueDescriptions()
When you create a parameter you are allowed to assign a description to each parameter value. Before CR 2016 you were only able to use the parameter values in your formulas. There was no easy way to get to the descriptions associated with the chosen values, although there were some cumbersome workarounds. Crystal 2016 has a new function that can read this list of descriptions. Here is a formula that would display the descriptions of all the selected values for the {?items} parameter.

Join( GetValueDescriptions( {?Items} ) , ', ' )

Range Functions
These functions are for getting the top and bottom from ranges values, but they don’t provide any new capabilities that I can see. They do the same thing that CR already does with the minimum() and maximum() functions. They were probably added to make the CR formula language more compatible with other languages.

GetLowerBound()
GetUpperBound()