Crystal Reports 2025 was released for purchase recently, but wasn’t available for a free trial download at that time.  As of today, Crystal Reports 2025 is available as a free trial.    If you are looking for what is different in Crystal Reports 2025 vs 2020, you can check out the “What’s New” page.

Crystal Reports 2025 is now available for purchase from SAP. The cost is the same: $495 for a full license and $295 for an upgrade. Normally, SAP offers a trial download of the products they are selling, but there is no trial download for CR 2025. You can still download a trial of CR 2020 or CR 2016.

I won’t be upgrading to 2025 in the near future. I have worked with CR 2020 with several customers but I have not installed it in my own environment. I still prefer using the 32-bit CR 2016, which is also still being sold. The main reason is that I am not yet ready to give up the legacy connection options available on the 32-bit platform.

If you are interested in what is new you can look at this SAP article.  Most of the new features are for users at the enterprise level.

There is a chance that Crystal Reports 2025 will be released next week on 3/12/2025.  I just viewed an SAP community page that mentions Crystal Reports 2025. The only problem is that page points to an article that focuses on SAP BI 2025 and doesn’t specifically mention Crystal Reports 2025 anywhere. I guess we will know more next week. SAP has always been cagey about new versions of Crystal Reports.

You should also check out the rest of this “new” community page. I say “new” because it is new to me.  It looks like it has been around for about a year without me noticing it. The good news is that most of it doesn’t require you to have an SAP account ID.

This page lets you download the install media for every version of Crystal reports for the past 20 years (including Crystal Reports XI from 2005). Yes, you still have to have a license key to complete the installs, but this is great for when computers crash and you lose your install files.

This page also has links to trial versions of Crystal Reports, SAP generated sample reports and lots of how-to guides (formulas, charts, etc).

And thanks to Gordon Portanier of Crystalize in Canada for sharing the link.

When Crystal Reports 2011 came out, SAP also introduced Crystal Reports for Enterprise (CR4E).  The two products would be parallel but:

“SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise is the foundation for all future releases of Crystal Reports.”

At that time most users were simply happy that the stand-alone version wasn’t being abandoned.

But CR4E never caught up with Crystal Reports (in features or usage).  According to an article I just discovered, CR4E is finally being allowed to sunset.  They are now providing instructions on how to migrate back to Crystal Reports from CR4E.

Like many users, I have not yet upgraded to CR 2020. I connect to lots of legacy data using DAO connections (e.g. Raiser’s Edge export data). To do this using CR 2020 involves installing new 64-bit connectors and updating each report. I’ve written up instructions on installing the new drivers but I haven’t applied the steps here since I am still on CR 2016.

This week I heard from a user who has to read legacy MDB files from Raiser’s Edge, using CR 2020. They followed my instructions to download the new driver, but got an error message when they tried to install it. The error said:

“You cannot install the 32-bit version of Microsoft Access Database Engine 2016 because you currently have 64-bit Office products installed. If you want to install 32-bit Microsoft Access Database Engine 2016, you will first need to remove the 64-bit installation of Office products. After uninstalling the following product(s), rerun setup in order to install 32-bit version of Microsoft Access Database Engine 2016:”

The funny thing is that they also tried to install the 32-bit driver and got the opposite error. So even though I don’t have CR 2020 I downloaded the 64-bit Access driver and tried to install it. I got the same error.

After a bit of research I found a way to get the driver to install without having to uninstall anything, by running the install from the command line using the ‘quiet’ switch. Here are the steps I used:

1) Download the file to my downloads directory
2) open a command line window
3) change the directory in the command line window to \downloads
4) Run the command with the “quiet” switch. It will look something like this:

C:\Users\ken\Downloads>AccessDatabaseEngine_X64.exe /quiet

You can also read the discussion where I found this method here:

https://superuser.com/questions/1557350/

After testing it here I did the same thing for Raiser’s Edge user and got them working as well. 

In the past few weeks I have been contacted by two different users with xBase data (dBASE, FoxPro, etc). Both were trying to read the data using CR 2020 and not finding a way to connect. One had to upgrade to 64-bit because some of the xBase.dbf files had gone past 2GB.  As I now know, a 32-bit process can only use a maximum of 2 GB of memory. I didn’t know this was a general limit, but I did know that when one of my MS Access databases gets to 2GB I have to purge and pack it before my reports will run.  The other user upgraded without knowing that his connectivity would be affected. They might be able to revert back to CR 2016.

I have still not upgraded to CR 2020 because I use DAO connections and have little motivation to change them. However, if I get a slow week, I plan to setup a test environment to experiment with CR 2020. Then I can see if there are any workarounds for the xBase issues.

If I can’t find a driver that can connect directly to xBase there is one other thing I may try. I have read that MS Access 2016 can connect to dBASE files. It may be possible that MS Access 2016 can be used as a bridge between Crystal and dBASE files.  If so that might work for other xBase flavors like FoxPro.  I will post what I find.

If anyone else has any ideas, I would love to hear from you.

Everyone has been talking about the new Java security vulnerability called Log4j. I have been talking to colleagues to determine if this affects Crystal Reports, Crystal Enterprise or anything else in the Crystal ecosystem. SAP put out a note that states that this vulnerability does not affect SAP Business Intelligence 4.2 or 4.3. It doesn’t mention earlier BI versions but these are no longer supported.

There was a support note about this topic, but nothing in the support note mentions Crystal Reports or the Crystal runtime engine used by third party applications. One of my colleagues said that since this is a Java vulnerability, it should not affect stand alone Crystal Reports, and I tend to agree. I also believe that if Crystal Reports were affected it would be mentioned in that support note. The same goes for the Crystal runtime files, but it would be nice if SAP responded specifically to these questions in the discussion above.

Last, thanks to Andrew Baines of Pursuit Technology and Danny Shahrabani of rePORTAL Software for helping me track down and make sense of the SAP support note.  If anyone else has info to share on this topic, please let me know.

I create reports for several customers who use Raiser’s Edge donor management software. One of my customers shared this note from BlackBaud that went out today:

“On December 15, 2021, we will no longer support the ability to create or edit custom reports using Crystal Reports directly within any Blackbaud solution. Users will still be able to view historical reports and export file formats that work with Crystal Reports.”

Before the 15th it wasn’t clear if reports would still run in RE, but now it appears that they still do. The only noticeable change is that users don’t have a built-in copy of the Crystal Reports designer. To modify reports they will need to purchase their own license.

If you decide to buy a copy of Crystal Reports to work with your RE export (mdb) files, I recommend that you buy Crystal Reports 2016 instead of Crystal Reports 2020. That will give you something that works very much like what you have now. Crystal Reports 2020 can be made to work but it is 64-bit so it will use different drivers. You could modify reports but you won’t be able to run that same report both outside and within RE.

See this article for a link to the Crystal Reports product page and for clarity on what you do and don’t need to buy.

For the past few weeks several customers have need help with registry changes. So I have spent lots of time referring to a document that SAP has posted on their web site. It shows all the registry keys for Crystal Reports. I wrote about it in my blog. When I need the link I search my blog to find the article that has the link.

Today I went to check that same document and I found that it was just a ‘preview’ of the article. The full article was part of the SAP (password protected) support portal. This change must have happened in the past few days. Fortunately I have an old (free) User ID and password. I logged in and I could read (and download) the full registry key document.  It was a minor hassle.

Then I tried to pull up a related article on editing the registry.  Again I was shown just a ‘preview’ of the article. This time my credentials didn’t get me to the full article. I was given a second login screen and my credentials were rejected.  SAP may be starting to restrict access to certain support materials.

I tried a variation of the second URL and got this message:

You are signed in with a P-user ID.
Visitors with an S-user ID will benefit from more tools and enhanced functionality.

According to this SAP Article, S-user IDs are provided to those who have an active support contract.  P-User IDs are for the public and for partners.

If you anyone notices any other content that moves from free access to paid-only access, please let me know.

After releasing my course materials and my “Expert” series I realized that I had forgotten one item: My set of calendars. This three report set, with instructions, allows you to generate 3 different styles of calendar from your data (continuous, monthly and daily). The first two allow you to show multi-day events as boxes that stretch from the beginning to the end of the event.

The reports are designed so that you can swap in your fields instead of the sample data fields. You can read more about them in my original blog post, or download the set and try them out.