Crystal will not allow you to delete a formula or parameter field from a report unless that item is no longer used anywhere in the report. Unfortunately, there are several hundred places where a formula could be hidden. These include sorting, grouping, selecting, totaling and dozens of formatting formulas for every report object. Checking all of these hiding places is not practical, so here are two ways to have Crystal help you uncover where the field is being used.

My favorite method is to edit the formula or parameter in question and change it’s data type. Continue Reading »
Finding a stray formula or parameter field

One of my most used formulas is my “Business Days” formula which allows you to calculate the number of business days between any two dates. But to do this you have to store a list of the holidays for each year. One of my readers (Mike Cook of Shepherd Hardware Products) provided a formula to calculate the common US holidays – even going so far as to provide a formula to calculate Good Friday, a pretty amazing feat. Now one of my Canadian readers (Greg Fendall at net-linx Americas) has provided the Canadian version of the holiday formula. If anyone would like to provide the formula for another country I will be happy to post it.

I just read a notice from BO (thanks to Dave Sharpe, a former student) that they are starting a BETA program for something called Crystal Reports Viewer XI. This is really a rehashing of their “Offline Viewer” which allows users to view and print reports, but ONLY if the report is saved with data. They apparently don’t want to sell a viewer that allows refreshing because then it will take significant market share from their more expensive server products.

They also started a forum for feedback from people in the BETA program and the first comments are pretty much “it needs to be able to refresh”. The response from the BO forum moderator hints that BO is (finally) considering releasing a viewer that can refresh reports. The question is can they develop something that works as well as the ones that are already out there.