I had a reader ask me about installing Crystal Reports version 7 on Windows Vista. It seems that the CR7 install crashes mid way through. Since I have avoided Vista so far so I didn’t have much advice to offer. Well he later told me that he got it to work by installing up to the point of the crash and then copying the rest of the files into the program folder. A week later he says that it seem to run fine. I am not sure I would recommend this combination or method, but I rarely argue with something that works. If anyone has a different experience or other problems with CR/Vista let me know.

I am often asked about how to create a Crystal Report that generates a “Bill of Materials” or BOM. A Bill of Materials is the list of parts required for a job or order. The challenge comes when the some of the parts are actually assemblies or ‘kits’, which are made up of other parts but sold under a single part number.

When a BOM includes an assembly item, it should show all of the components needed to make that assembly. In some cases the assembly is made up of individual components but it is also possible that an assembly is made up of another smaller assembly - which may also be made up of another even smaller assembly. Customer describe their BOM requirements as having to go down 5, 10 or even more levels to get to the individual parts. The question is how do you do this in Crystal?

Some people think they can solve this with the “hierarchical grouping” (HG) feature of Crystal Reports. Continue Reading »
Can Hierarchical Grouping create a Bill of Materials (BOM)?

Assume you have a series of dated transactions. Crystal allows you to use custom functions for things like Month to Date, Year to Date, etc. However these are always based on calendar periods. Month to Date is Calendar month. Year to Date is based on a calendar year, etc. Here is a method that you can use if your business year is a non-calendar or fiscal year. Continue Reading »
Calculating Fiscal YTD

Often subreports are used in Crystal Reports to retrieve an unrelated value from a different table or data source. In many of these cases you do not want to see the subreport at all. You just want to retrieve your value and use it. You soon realize, however, that if you suppress the subreport object, or if you suppress the section that contains the subreport, the subreport will simply not run.

To make a subreport run but be completely invisible you suppress Continue Reading »
The Stealth Subreport

A former student was having trouble adding decimals to the cells of his cross-tab and asked me why. After doing some research I found a problem that I had not noticed before. Cross-tab summaries of Count and DistinctCount that do percentage of total calculations are always truncated to an integer (not rounded). This means that they will not total correctly Continue Reading »
Percentages in Cross-tabs that do not round correctly

I had to create an “Income Trend” report this weekend with 12 columns, one for each month of the year. The user inputs the current month and the report prints the columns for January through the selected month. When they enter 8 for August, the report is designed to only show 8 columns, January through August. Since I had to create all 12 columns I gave each column a suppress condition that hides that column when it is a future month.

Then I hit a problem. There were a half dozen horizontal lines going across the entire width of the report. Once I started suppressing later months I noticed how ugly it looked to have a few visible columns but a line that stretched out to the invisible 12th column. I also realized that there isn’t a way in Crystal to have a line grow, shrink or suppress based on a condition. I tried a few solutions before I came up with a relatively simple way Continue Reading »
A line that grows automatically