There are several methods for putting an object into place on a Crystal Report. You can use the “Snap to Grid” feature, the Guidelines, you can use “Free Form Placement” and place the object in position by sight, or you can set the position digitally using “Object Size and Position”.

If you use the last one, you may be frustrated by a quirk in Crystal that seems to affect all versions from 8.5 through XI – the mysterious shifting object. I wrote about this in my newsletter 4 years ago and even gave a LINK to the official workaround. But, I didn’t expect to be writing about it again 4 years later. Apparently this ‘feature’ is difficult for Business Objects to fix (or maybe it is just a low priority). So here it is again for those of you who haven’t run into this little gem.

When you change the settings in ‘object size and position’ for an object, CR will often (but not always) reduce the numbers you entered by .01 without any warning. So if you specifically set the ‘X’ value to 0.69, CR may change it to 0.68 after you click ‘OK’. You won’t see the change until you go back into the ‘object size and position’ property again. The funny part is that if you open it back up to check the number and click ‘OK’ again, CR will reduce it again to .67, and next time to .66, and so on. The workaround in the official BO knowledge base? When this happens just set the value to be .01 higher than you really want.

The numbers tend to stop this behavior when they reach .x0 values, like .70 or .40 and sometimes when they reached a .x5 value. I guess there is some internal rounding that fails.