One of my customer sent me two screen shots. One showed a normal preview on his development machine. The other showed a preview window on the runtime machine. The second had the group tree, but the report was nothing but a long blank vertical strip. He had been struggling with it for a month and could not figure out what was causing the strange behavior at runtime.

When the preview behavior changes on a different machine, it is usually due to a printer driver problem. I also know that CR will normally look for the same printer that was used at the time the report was developed. If it doesn’t find the same printer name it will then use the default printer on the runtime machine. The long narrow strip didn’t look like a normal printer, so I wondered if the new workstation somehow was defaulting to a label printer – one with a very narrow printable area. So I Emailed my customer if the deployment workstation had a label printer as the default printer. Here is part of the response:

“All I have to say is WOW! I changed the default printer and problem instantly solved. It has haunted me for a month and you resolved it in one simple email.”

Not all problems are this easy to solve, but if you have a strange behavior with one of your reports it might be worthwhile to let me take a look.