Many of you have purchased or have considered purchasing my Quick Reference to Crystal Reports in VB. This small guide includes all of the essential commands for launching and manipulating a Crystal Report from a VB application. Over the years some of you have asked about deploying Crystal Reports from VBA, which is very similar. Some have used my guide to help do this and found that most of the commands are the same since VBA uses the same RDC object model.

One snag for me has always been auto resizing a VBA form. The VB commands are available in VBA but I could never get them to work. I assumed I was doing something wrong and put it on my list of problems to solve someday. This week, one of my customers faced the same problem and did some research to find the reason why. The commands that work in VB are only for reports in VBA. They are not available for forms. He then found a FormInfo class that can be used to get a VBA form to resize the way VB forms do.

I have now added an addendum to my VB Guide with some basic VBA information. If you have purchased my VB guide in the past and are interested in the additional VBA information, please let me know.

The width of the design screen in Crystal Reports is taken from your default printer settings; including the paper size and orientation. These settings can be changed using the menu options “File – Printer Setup”?. The maximum width for most printers is about 13.5 inches, achieved by using legal size paper in landscape orientation.

But some reports are never sent to a printer. They are only exported or previewed to the screen. This can be frustrating because even these reports are limited to the width of that specific printer.

If you need a wider design area for an exported report, you need a to setup a printer driver that supports wider paper sizes Continue Reading »
Expanding the design area in Crystal Reports

One of my readers sent me a note that BO has apparently extended their $99 upgrade offer until 9/28/07.? I went to the BO online store and confirmed that the upgrade price for Crystal Reports XI Developer or Professional still shows $99 – but only if you select the “Americas” option. If you select “International” then the Upgrade is the normal price.

However, I have a previous blog entry with a link for International users to get the same special price. The link was supposed to expire with the original offer in March but the page is still available. If someone tries it and finds that it doesn’t allow the sale to complete, please let me know.

I am working on a Crystal Reports project where I have to print multiple packing slips for one report record. The number of packing slips is determined by the quantity field in each record. One way is to do this is to create a fixed number of separate subsections, each holding one copy of the packing slip. You could then conditionally suppress some of the copies based on the quantity needed. This technique works well in some environments but has 2 weaknesses: Continue Reading »
Using “Table Inflation” to your Advantage