If you are using or considering ZetaFax to distribute Crystal Reports then be aware that ZetaFax seems to have issues with the newer versions of Crystal. I found several postings from people who upgraded Crystal from 8.5 to a later version and found that ZetaFax no longer could read the embedded fax number tags in the report. No one knows for sure why but it appears to be related to the Unicode compliant characters used by Crystal starting with v9. I asked the folks at ZetaFax Continue Reading »
Crystal Reports and ZetaFax don’t play well together anymore

Barry Walter has just released a tool to help Crystal Reports developers organize and explore their reports. It automatically extracts and stores all of the database connections, tables, joins and even the formulas used in all of your reports. You can then select any connection, table or field to see which reports use that object. Continue Reading »
New Data Dictionary Builder for Crystal Reports

A user recently sent me a Crystal Reports file that seemed to be corrupted. Every time he tried to open it Crystal would crash. I tried it myself using several versions of Crystal and got the same results. I told him that there was no way I knew of to recover the file and hoped that he had a backup of an older version. He didn’t, and the report represented several weeks of work. Lesson number one. Keep some interim backups.

But, later that same day he told me that he found a company that was able to recover the file. Continue Reading »
Recovery of corrupted RPT files

If you are a Small or Medium size business and want to put your Crystal Reports on the Internet or your Intranet, then you should take a look at RippleStone. Ripplestone is web application that includes many of the features of Crystal Reports Server or BO Enterprise but at a much lower cost. You get: Continue Reading »
Special offer on RippleStone web portal for Crystal Reports:

If had to pick one topic to share with every Crystal Reports user it would be the existence of third party report viewer programs. These viewers allow you to Run, Refresh, Fill in Parameters, Preview, Export, Print, Drill-Down and just about everything else you could do in the preview tab of Crystal Reports. What you can’t do Continue Reading »
Crystal Reports Viewer Programs