I was recently teaching a class using a new Vista laptop and Crystal Reports v10. When I got to the lesson on date parameters I started to show the class how to change the month or the year in the little pop-up calendar. What I got was something I had never seen before. Instead of scrolling through consecutive months or years I got a zoom out/zoom in interface. It would zoom out from a month view, to a year view, to a decade view and finally to a century view. Then I could zoom back in by selecting the correct decade, then a specific year in that decade, then a specific month and then the desired date. It was a nice little interface but I had never seen it before in all my years of using v10. No one else in the class had this interface inside v10.

At first I thought this was some update from BO, so I tried v11 and v12 and then checked v9 which is virtually identical to v10. I found that the other three versions had completely different date selection interfaces – and none of them had the nifty zoom feature I found in v10. It wasn’t until weeks later that I figured out where it came from. I opened the time/date calender in the control panel and realized that this zoom feature was the calendar control used by Vista. Apparently v10 didn’t have it’s own calendar control but would piggyback on the calendar control of the PC. So Crystal v10 on XP would use the XP calendar, but v10 on Vista uses the new Vista calendar.

Crystal Reports v9 has it’s own built in calendar control while Crystal Reports v11 used a (really bad) HTML calendar control run inside Internet Explorer. Then Crystal Reports v12 brought back a decent built-in Calendar Control, which is much better then the one in v11.

I actually like quite a few things about v12 and I have started using it for my personal reports and for many complex projects. This is the first time since v8 that I have moved immediately to the newest version of Crystal Reports.