I like using the “report wizard”  to create the first draft of a new report.  It was even better back in v8.5 when you had the report expert and could loop through the steps several times.  But even now I find the wizard helpful.  Not only can you quickly assemble a simple report, but it automatically gives you a nice evenly spaced column layout.  And, it does a few things for you that you are very likely to do anyway – like adding a page number or today’s date.

Yesterday I was working with a customer in version 11 (XI) and we noticed a strange behavior in the wizard. We went one step further than we wanted to and hit the ‘back’ button in the wizard to go back a step.  We ended up losing part of the wizard window on the right and couldn’t get it back.  I ended up clicking “Finish” just so we could get out and we did the last steps through the normal menu.

I found out that this is a known issue in some builds of XI.  There is an article on the SAP/BO support site but fixing it involves a registry edit. If you have this issue and want to resolve it you can go to the NOTES section of the BO support site and look for article # 1246536 entitled:

“Standard Crystal Report creation wizard screen shrinks from right side when the ‘Back’ button is clicked”.

Update 7/12/2015:

A temporary solution is to resize the window. That usually straightens things out till the next time you click ‘Back’ in the wizard.