How would you like your reports to be automatically run, exported to a PDF and delivered to your Email InBox every Monday morning at 6am?  The Crystal Reports designer doesn’t provide a way to do this (unless you upgrade to CR Server or BO Enterprise).  But if you look at third party products like those on my LINKS page you will find several reasonably priced (or even free) tools that are designed to help you do this.  Some do even more.

So this post will compare desktop scheduling tools, providing you with their core features and prices so that you can narrow down your search.  I am working on another post covering server based scheduling tools that I hope to have ready in a few weeks.  If you think one person can manage all the scheduling you are probably fine with one of the desktop tools – regardless of the number of recipients.  If you plan to have multiple people scheduling reports then you will want to look at the server based tools.

Below is a brief introduction to each product and what sets that product apart. I have also created a detailed Continue Reading »
Desktop Based Scheduling Engines

Last week a customer called me after they did an upgrade of PeachTree Accounting.  It seems that the records in the report that used to sort were now appearing in random order.  As soon as I added the sort back in and refreshed the report, all the records disappeared.  Fortunately I had seen this before because I work quite a bit with PeachTree and PeachTree uses Btrieve as a database engine.

This week I had another Btrieve customer (not PeachTree) who wanted to add a parameter to select a part number.  We added the rule in the selection formula and, again, all the records disappeared.  Same problem same solution.

Apparently when Crystal sends a query to a Btrieve engine, Btrieve tries to ‘help out’ by Continue Reading »
Vanishing data in Btrieve

There are many ways to deploy Crystal Reports to users.  I normally lean toward the simpler and less expensive options, like locally installed viewers.  But there are environments where a server based option is necessary.  The ‘official’ options from SAP are Crystal Reports Server and BO Enterprise.  You can read about these on the SAP website under the heading “SAP Business Objects portfolio”.  But there are other products out there that most users never see. These are third party products that also allow you to centrally manage your report deployment from your server.  The list includes:

Ripplestone – Traditional portal
rePORTAL - Traditional portal
ReCrystallize Pro – Web Launch page generator.
Universal Report Server (URS) – Server-based scheduling engine
Report Launch – Bridge between BO server products and server based applications.

The products vary widely and are aimed at Continue Reading »
Server based options for Deploying Crystal Reports

If you export two reports to PDF and want to merge them into one, or combine them with other PDF files, you might want to look at a free tool I just discovered called PDFsam.  This isn’t a trial version of something but a free open source tool.  I tried it recently when I needed a way to merge a Word doc and a Spreadsheet into a single PDF, rotating the Spreadsheet 90 degrees in the process.

Whenever available, I usually opt for “free open source software” (FOSS).  Software that is open source means that it was developed by a volunteer team that provides the source code for their application for free. Not only do you know it is free but it makes it much less likely that someone will try to include malicious code.   If you want to see what is available in FOSS you should check out SourceForge.net, one of the most reliable sources for FOSS.

If the chart feature in Crystal Reports don’t quite do what you want, you might want to upgrade your charting engine to CR Chart. CR Chart is sold by Three D Graphics. And since Three D Graphics makes the current Crystal Reports charting engine, you know that the upgrade is fully compatible. You just replace one DLL with an upgraded DLL.

So what does CR Chart allow you to do? You get to use new chart types that aren’t currently in CR, like BoxPlots, Pareto Charts and Waterfall Charts. You can change chart properties dynamically at runtime and even add programmable reference lines and labels to your charts.

And as a special offer to my readers, you can save 25% on your purchase Continue Reading »
Exclusive discount on CR Chart

One of my readers who uses Clarion as a development platform has been struggling with an upgrade to CR 2008 for several weeks.  He was upgrading from v8.5 to CR 2008 (v12) and we found that some reports that would run fine in CR 8.5 would not run in CR 2008.  We narrowed it down to reports that had more than 2 tables so I figured it was a problem with the SQL syntax and sure enough, v8.5 uses a different syntax for these reports.  We tried downloading the latest TPS ODBC driver and it didn’t help.

So I contacted a colleague Continue Reading »
Clarion/Topspeed ODBC fails in CR 2008 and CR XI (solved)

Creating Crystal Reports from PeachTree accounting data has become a specialty of mine.  But getting data out of PeachTree has always been something of a challenge because the only way to access the data has been using the proprietary Btrieve query enginge rather than the more standard SQL method.  But I just helped a customer upgrade their reports to PeachTree 2010 and was pleased to see that this latest version of PeachTree now accesses the data using OLEDB instead of Btrieve.

Since OLEDB is SQL based, this means Continue Reading »
PeachTree finally allows SQL (OLEDB)

Some of you are probably familiar with CrystalReports.com (known as CRDC).  This is the site sponsored by SAP/BO where you can host your reports and make them available on the web.  When CRDC was introduced a few years ago it only allowed you to share reports that had saved data.  Then it changed to allow you to refresh reports if your had a server product like CR Server or BO Enterprise.  More recently they broadened this to refresh data from your SalesForce.com database.

I just learned recently that Crystal Reports.com now has the ability to refresh reports from pretty much any data that can be made available to your web server, which makes a workable solution for some users. You have to install some software on your server which allows CRDC to reach behind your firewall.  This software Continue Reading »
Refreshing reports hosted on CrystalReports.com

One of my readers tipped me off to a web site that has a handy Crystal Reports DLL that you can download for free.  This DLL adds several custom functions to your formula editor that allow your formulas to do all sorts of new things (and some I don’t recommend that you try).

There are about 40 functions in the DLL that allow your formulas to interact with the operating system. Here are some examples: Continue Reading »
Handy custom functions in a free DLL

According to this Blog post on the SAP network, SAP is now selling a license that allows you to redistribute web applications which include the Crystal Reports 2008 runtime engine.  Before this license, every deployment of a web application required the client to purchase one copy of Crystal Reports 2008 to provide the runtime license for the Crystal web engine. Now the application developer can purchase a “Developer Advantage” distribution license for $2500 that allows them the right to unlimited distribution of the runtime engine.  This only applies to CR 2008.  Deploying a web application on any prior version still requires that you follow the licensing model for that version.  Developer Advantage does NOT allow you to distribute the Crystal Reports designer, and it does NOT allow for “Software as a Service” deployments, both of which you should discuss with their OEM team.

There is still the option to purchase a single copy of Crystal Reports 2008 to support a single deployment, but this option is going to be phased out in favor of the Developer Advantage license.  The good news is that this has no effect on “Thick Client” or local deployments where the runtime engine is installed and run on a workstation.  Crystal Reports still allows unlimited deployment of client based applications if you use the developer edition of any prior version, or CR 2008 (which only comes in one edition).