Crystal Reports is a great tool, but it isn’t perfect. One of my long standing complaints is how hard it can be to grab the sizing handles on an object using the mouse. The active zone around the sizing handle is tiny, so you have to be very precise or you end up dragging the object around instead of sizing it. You would think that zooming in would make the active zone bigger, but it doesn’t.

So I was very happy when I discovered, years ago, that you could size objects with the keyboard. If you hold down the shift key and hit the left/right arrow keys you can make the object’s right side move in and out. If you hold down the shift key and hit the up/down arrow keys you can make the objects bottom edge move up and down. If instead you hold the CTRL key while you hit the arrow keys, the entire object moves in one of the 4 directions but the size doesn’t change.

But soon after I started using Shift-Arrow I found that it didn’t work half the time. It was just this past week when I figured out the two situations where you can’t use Shift -Arrow to size objects:

1) When you are in Preview mode. For some reason using Shift-Arrow only works in Design mode. This is odd because using CTRL-Arrow to move objects can be done in both design and preview. That may be a bug but I found it true in all the versions I tested.

2) When the edge of the object snaps to a guideline. Once an object is ‘snapped’ to a vertical or horizontal guideline, the snapped edge can’t be moved using Shift-Arrow.  But following the pattern mentioned above, guidelines snapped to the top or left side do not prevent using CTRL-Arrow to move objects.