When I started my newsletter in 2001 one of my first issues focused on Crystal Reports viewer programs. And because I think this topic is important, I launched this blog 3 years ago with a first post about viewers. I write about them regularly and yet I still find people who don’t know about viewers, or who think that all viewers are as useless as the ‘official’ viewer put out by SAP. Some of these viewers do really cool things and most are inexpensive (or free). So if you have users who need to preview, refresh, print or export reports without having CR installed, you should check out the “viewers” section of my LINKS page.

This LINKS page also contains other Crystal-related utilities, 50 products in all. It is one of the most popular pages on my site. Here are some of the other things you can do using these tools:

Email each page of a report to a different person.
Automatically run reports at 2am every morning and Email the output.
Run reports from a DOS batch file.
Hold a report in preview mode while it refreshes itself ever 30 seconds.
Set a report to repeatedly test for exceptions and automatically generate alerts.
Create a web portal where users can launch reports from a browser.

Filter the data in the report based on who is running it
View the differences between 2 reports
List all reports that use a specific table/field/formula/parameter
Encrypt a report so it can’t be opened in CR, but can still be run by the user.

Calculate a value in one report and use that value in a separate report, tomorrow.
Update a database value with a value calculated by a report.
Include system info in the report (User, PC Name, INI or registry values, etc)

Export each page of a report to a separate tab in a spreadsheet.
Export each page of a report to a separate PDF file.
Export to PDFs with a bookmark tree.
Export to ODBC and append the records to an existing table

If you have use for any of these features, and you want to know which tools are best for a task, then give me a call.