Every version of Crystal Reports in the past 20 years comes with a neat little label wizard that allows you to automatically set up about 30 common Avery label sizes. But there are a few things you need to know to avoid problems.

Tip #1) A report created using the label wizard can’t be changed to a regular report, and a regular report can’t have one of the label sizes automatically applied. You have to decide to use the label wizard when you first create the report. The wizard is found under the menu options “File > New > Mailing Label Wizard”.

Tip #2) The wizard lets you pick the fields you want, but it will put each field you select on its own line. So, if you create an address label and add the fields City-State-Zip, the wizard will put those fields on 3 separate lines. I add only the first field of each line while I am in the wizard. Then when I preview the report I can add the other fields, or write a formula to combine all of the fields that you need.

Tip #3) This label wizard always puts the label fields on subsections of the details band. If you want to print one label per group, don’t try to move the fields to group headers or you will make lots of unnecessary work. Instead you can make the detail labels appear as if they are at the group level by only printing the first detail label of each group.

To do this you:

• Add the group to the report
• Suppress both the Group Header and the Group Footer.
• Create a running total field that counts the records in each group(reset ‘on change of group’).
• Suppress the Detail sections or the Detail parent section with a condition that says:

{#running total} > 1

Only the first record (label) of each group will print. This allows you to use the wizard to get the layout automatically, but still print one record per group.