I have written before about using auto-complete when writing Crystal Reports formulas. I have actually written about it twice because I sometimes forget about my own previous posts).

During a recent remote consult I was writing a new formula.  I used auto-complete to insert an existing formula into the new one.  My instance of Crystal Reports immediately crashed.  I thought it was a fluke so I reopened Crystal and repeated the same steps. Crystal crashed a second time.

So I had the customer send me the report and I opened it on my own computer. I added the same formula using autocomplete and it didn’t crash, but I did get an error message saying “Invalid Argument”.  That happened every time I tried to add that field using auto-complete.  So I used the mouse to select the field and that worked fine. That is when I noticed that there was an extra space at the end of the formula name. I have seen one bug with spaces at the beginning of a formula name so I figured the space on the end might be causing the new problem.  I tried other formulas and found that auto-complete worked fine as long as there was no space on the end.  I guess in some environments that error can cause CR to completely crash.

I can think of no reason to intentionally end a formula name with a space. But when I am duplicating and renaming a series of formulas it is easy to leave a space at the end and not notice. And these spaces won’t be very obvious when you look at a list of formulas. So if you get one of these behaviors, this is one more thing to check.