I have updated my course books to cover the new features of Crystal Reports 2008. So if you are using this newest version of Crystal, and are looking to have on-site training, I can help. The new features include interactive parameters, sort controls and inserting calculated rows and columns into cross-tabs. I also have a full review of new features in CR 2008.

There are now 2 editions of my courseware. The new edition covers versions 9 through 12 while the older edition covers versions 6 – 8.5. If you are looking for reasonably priced courseware you can read more about what makes my books different.

Gordon Portanier of Crystalize recently sent me a note about a promotional page for Crystal Reports Viewer that talks about the ability to refresh reports. That surprised him because (as my readers know) the official viewer released by BO is the ONLY viewer out there that does NOT allow you to refresh the report’s data. (There are a dozen independent viewers that allow refreshing and many other features.) So Gordon tested the BO viewer and found that it still does not allow refresh, despite the clear wording of the ad, which currently starts with the title:

“Open, View & Refresh a Crystal Report Instantly.”

I expect it to be changed soon assuming it is an error. If it is not changed soon then it could be BO intentionally trying to confuse (and annoy) their users.

Update – it was changed as of 7/14.

Traditionally, a CSV file would not be expected to have field or column headings on the first row. But this has been a requirement in a number of environments that I have worked in. Providing this has been a challenge until recently. In most Crystal environment, a CSV export would take every visible object on the page and make it into a column. The last column is often a column of ones, created from the page number in the page footer.

Up through CRvXI release 1 it was possible to get column headings to print as the first row of the CSV export, but it was a complicated process. It involved modifying the report, installing a special driver and even tweaking the registry settings for Crystal Reports. The steps are outlined in knowledge base article c2014451 which is no longer available.

If this is a regular requirement in your environment, then you should seriously consider an upgrade to XIr2 or CR 2008 (also known as versions 11.5 and 12). I just noticed that the CSV export in these versions has a new check mark asking if you want to ‘isolate’ the Page Headers. If you check this property the values of the page header become the first row of the CSV export.

Note that if you are on CR v8.5 you may need an updated copy of u2fsepv.dll. I think the minimum version of this DLL that supports this method is 8.6.2.475. If you can’t find the DLL I can help there as well.

Say you have 2 group levels in your report Customer and Product. You have subtotals at the end of each group, so you have 2 levels of subtotals. What do you do if you want to have a page break after each product? Your first attempt would be to simply go into the section expert for GF2 and check “New Page After”. This works fine except for the last product in each Customer. The Customer’s subtotals would end up printing on the top of the next page, which would be a different Customer’s page. So you add Continue Reading »
Cascading page breaks (on Interior Groups)