This one stumped me for a while today. I was testing a new formula and needed to group a series of dates into 2-week periods ending on a user selected Date. If the user selects Wednesday 8/16/06 there would be periods ending on 8/2, 8/16, 8/30 and so on. All transactions before and after the selected date would be grouped into 2-week periods ending on the appropriate Wednesday.

The method sounds simple. Continue Reading »
When Up is Down (rounding negative numbers)

This isn’t strictly a Crystal topic, but something many of you may find useful. I have recently tried 2 services that allow me to receive faxes via Email. This is a big help when I am on the road. Continue Reading »
Receiving and sending faxes without a fax machine

I had to create an “Income Trend” report this weekend with 12 columns, one for each month of the year. The user inputs the current month and the report prints the columns for January through the selected month. When they enter 8 for August, the report is designed to only show 8 columns, January through August. Since I had to create all 12 columns I gave each column a suppress condition that hides that column when it is a future month.

Then I hit a problem. There were a half dozen horizontal lines going across the entire width of the report. Once I started suppressing later months I noticed how ugly it looked to have a few visible columns but a line that stretched out to the invisible 12th column. I also realized that there isn’t a way in Crystal to have a line grow, shrink or suppress based on a condition. I tried a few solutions before I came up with a relatively simple way Continue Reading »
A line that grows automatically

I see this type of question all the time.

“I wrote 3 formulas and Crystal lets me do a grand total of 2 of them, but not the the third one. Why not?”

When I teach this concept in class I have to start by explaining the “hump” that exists in the report creation process. The hump is my name for the step where Crystal does all of the grouping, sorting and totaling. Most formulas can be calculated before the hump, while some must be Continue Reading »
Why can’t I total this formula?

Business Objects maintains several indexes that list all of their available technical documents. You can download these indexes as PDFs and then browse them for topics that interest you. Each PDF covers one product area. To download one of these PDFs you Continue Reading »
Indexes of BO technical documentation

I just got a promo in my mail from Business Objects for a new product suite called “Crystal Vision”. This is actually a combination of Crystal Reports XI, Crystal Xcelsius and a third feature called “Live Office”. I am sure you all know Crystal Reports. I recently wrote an article in my newsletter describing Xcelsius which allows you build and deploy interactive flash based dashboards that read Excel data.

Live Office (which is part of BO Enterprise ) gives you Continue Reading »
Crystal Vision

Those of you in the Washington DC Area might want to attend the DCAUG meeting next Wednesday:

Date: Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Time: 9:15 a. m. – 2:45 p. m. (registration begins at 9:00)
Location: Continue Reading »
DC Area Business Objects/Crystal Reports Users Group Meeting

Just this week, Business Objects released Crystal Reports for Eclipse (Basic Edition) – a 100% Java based report designer and deployment engine. It allows you to create and deploy Crystal Reports within your Java environment for free. It also includes:

Continue Reading »
Crystal Reports for Eclipse (Open Source Reporting)

When Business Objects rolled out XI Release 2, I wasn’t expecting them to upgrade the Crystal Report designer as well, but I was surprised. There is now a Crystal Reports XI Release 2 that you can apparently download for free. This is required if you need Visual Studio 2005 compatibility or if you need to connect to universes in BO Enterprise XI Release 2. It should not be used at ALL with BO Enterprise XI Release 1.

If you do update your Crystal Reports there are several new Continue Reading »
Crystal Reports XI Release 2 (Documentation and new features)

The second thing I would want every Crystal user to know would be the existance of Tek-Tips.com. This site should be in the ‘bookmarks’ of every Crystal Reports user.

Tek-Tips is a free site where technical professionals get to ask and answer each other’s technical questions. Now I know there there are lots of sites and newsgroups out there but Tek-Tips is special. It has over one million members and Continue Reading »
Tek-Tips.com