One of my favorite sayings:

Good judgement comes from experience.
And experience comes from bad judgement.

I was reminded of the value of AutoSave this week when one of my reports froze up on me before I had a chance to save a large number of changes. I waited for it to come back and even went to lunch. But an hour later the report was still frozen. Normally I am pretty good about saving my work often, but I had been concentrating on a problem and lost track of time.

The machine I was working on did not have the CR AutoSave feature activated. But somehow the report that froze did not freeze the rest of  Crystal. I was able to use the menu and save my other reports, but I could not save the report I had been working on.

Since the menu was still working I took a long shot and activated the AutoSave feature. After a few minutes I noticed a new RPT file in the temp directory and it had all of my most recent changes. So even though it would not let me save the “frozen” report, CR was able to AutoSave it for me.

And as if that wasn’t a strong enough message, I had three client workstations crash on me this past week. None of them had AutoSave activated. So allow me to make a public service announcement:  Read my prior post on how to use the AutoSave feature and then activate it in your environment.