I found a limit that exists in Crystal that I didn’t know about before. Even if I had known about this limit I wouldn’t have ever expected to exceed it.  But it just popped up in one of my reports.

I created a report related to donors for a large organization. One part of the report needed to show the top 10 donors from a very large pool of people. I decided to use a cross-tab with a “Group Sort” so we wouldn’t need another subreport.  It tested just fine on the sample data set.

But, when they ran the report on the full table they received an error saying a cross-tab couldn’t have more than 65K rows or 65K columns. Apparently, the data set included over 100K donors.  To find the top 10 donors, the cross-tab would have to initially create a row for every donor. Even though I only needed to see the top 10, the cross-tab needed to see ALL of them, and that exceeded the limit.

Instead I created a subreport and grouped by donor. Then used the “Group Sort” on the actual groups, rather than a cross-tab. Fortunately this limit doesn’t apply to groups in the report, only to groups (rows or columns) in cross-tabs.