I try to avoid copying text directly from a formatted document (Word, PDF, etc) directly into a Crystal Reports text object. While Crystal can accept many of the formatting characters from other applications, they can sometimes cause unpredictable behavior.

I recently had a customer show me a text object in Crystal that refused to display the first few characters of the text. We would see these character when the text object was in ‘edit’ mode but they would disappear when we exited and went to preview. We couldn’t find the formatting characters that were causing this behavior, and if we copied the text to a new text object the behavior followed. We finally solved it by copying the text to Notepad, and then copying from Notepad to a new text object. This stripped out all the hidden formatting.

So now whenever I have to transfer formatted text to a report, I first paste it into a simple text editor like Notepad. Then I will copy the text and paste that into Crystal. I can then add any needed formatting within Crystal Reports.