Archive for November, 2007



IBM Purchases Cognos

Tuesday 13 November 2007 @ 7:37 am

IBM has announced plans to purchase Cognos, the last of the big 3 independent BI Vendors, for $5 Billion Dollars. You can read this analysis in Information Week. SAP just started their purchase of Business Objects for $6.8 billion and Oracle recently acquired Hyperion for $3.3 billion.




Free Crystal Reports Viewer with, Scheduling and Email Distribution

Monday 12 November 2007 @ 10:05 pm

SaberLogic of Wadsworth, OH has developed a new Crystal Reports viewer. It allows reports to be refreshed, scheduled, exported, printed and even sent out via Email. It is called Logicity and is compatible with all versions of Crystal from 8.5 through XI. They have released both a free version and a PRO ($45) version. The free version has most of the capabilities of the PRO version and doesn’t have any ads, SPAM or spyware.

The PRO version comes with installation support and adds features like user logging, and password protection for reports. A site license (for very large installs) is available for $4,500. If you decide to purchase Pro before the end of the year you can get a 10% discount by using my discount code, which is CRU (as in the Crystal Reports Underground).

If you decide to try it and find anything you like or don’t like, please let me know. And if you purchase the PRO version don’t forget to claim your discount.




Distinct Count of an IF-THEN statement

Friday 9 November 2007 @ 6:02 pm

If you need to do a distinct count of records that meet a specific criteria you can do a Distinct Count of an IF-THEN statement. But you will run into an interesting problem. The records that don’t meet the criteria will all have an ELSE value, and that extra value also gets counted. The result is that your distinct count is usually one higher than it should be. Some users assume that if they simply skip the ELSE line of the formula, that CR will use a NULL value as the ELSE, and that the NULL won’t be counted. However, CR does not use NULL by default. If you skip the ELSE, Crystal will use the default value for that fields data type – usually an empty string (“”) or a zero. But there is away to fool CR into returning a NULL value as your ELSE value. See my (recently improved) Formula 14 for the solution.

For more tips like this you should check out my Expert Techniques series.

(Thanks to Jacques Sauvageau of Wilson Banwell PROACT for suggesting the VAL / TONUMBER. That saves a couple of steps over my original method. )




Crystal Reports 2008 (version 12) is available for download / purchase

Friday 9 November 2007 @ 4:27 pm

I mentioned recently that CR 2008 was “released”. But at that time, only the BETA was availble for download and you could only ‘preorder’ the final product. I just checked the BO website and now the full final product is available. You can do a 30 day trial or a purchase. Purchase is $495 for the full product and $295 for an upgrade.

I also checked some web software retailers but couldn’t find the product sold at any of my normal retailers. Let me know if you find it somewhere else, especially at a lower price. However, I am guessing that BO is going to set and enforce minimum prices. If I remember correctly, a recent US court ruling allows manufacturer’s to set minimum prices for their distributors and that may affect web prices on many items.




Store a value today and use it in a different report tomorrow

Monday 5 November 2007 @ 3:21 pm

Those of you who have worked with subreports know that you can pass a value from the subreport to the main report and back again. But have you ever needed to create a value in one report and use that value in a completely different report? Or maybe store a value from a monthly report to use in next month’s report? Here are 2 ways to accomplish this using 3rd Party dll files: Continue Reading »
Store a value today and use it in a different report tomorrow





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