I had a request this week that sounded relatively simple on the surface. The data was a list of people with from 1 to 10 characteristic rows. The wanted me to assemble all the characteristics for each person into a single alphabetized string, and then count how many people had each string combination. This meant that I had to Group [by person] and then Sort [by characteristic] then Group again[by the combined string]. That is one pass more than Crystal Reports can do.

My normal solution for this would be to do the first pass in the database using a SQL command. And I would have succeeded if the data had been in SQL Server or Oracle. The RowNumber () and Partition functions I wrote about recently would have been part of the solution. But, alas, the data was a classic MS Access MDB file.

After quite a bit of research I found a way to write a SQL command for MS Access that would do the job.  It worked in my test data, but it took hours to run on a normally sized sample of data.

So I offered the customer a relatively fast two-step approach, which is my last resort for getting an extra pass. This involves writing one report to do part of the work, then exporting the results to a spreadsheet, and finally creating a second report to create the final output from the spreadsheet data.

In this case the first report groups, sorts and assembles the string of characteristics for each person. This is exported to a spreadsheet as one column of data, with one row per person. Then the second report reads this spreadsheet and groups on that column and counts occurrences of each value. The process takes a few minutes.

One thing to note, this process is very simple if your export can use classic (XLS) spreadsheets. Crystal includes a native driver that can read tables in XLS files. But XLS files are limited to 64K rows.

The newer XLSX files can hold up to one million rows, and versions of Crystal since 2011 can export to XLSX files. But reading an XLSX file with Crystal requires that you have newer MS Office drivers that don’t come with Crystal Reports. To see if you have these drivers you can create a new OLEDB connection and look in the providers list for:

“Microsoft Office 12.0 Access Database Engine OLE DB Provider

If you don’t see this provider listed you can download and install the drivers.