I worked with a customer yesterday who had a Zebra TLP 3842 printer to print individual labels. They recently upgraded from CR 9 to CR12 (2008) and with that upgrade they lost the ability to print labels correctly. After many attempts to isolate the problem we got down to this.

1) The preview in CR12 is correct, but the label contents print rotated 90 degrees. It seemed like an Continue Reading »
CR 2008 doesn’t like Zebra Label Printers?

All of my students learn how to use the VAL() function, which converts numeric characters into true numerics. The VAL() function works by starting at the left of the string, reading the digits, and stopping when it hits the first alpha character. It then converts the numeric characters it has found into numbers. However, if it finds a dash before it finds an alpha character, it flips the sign of the numeric result to negative and keeps reading the digits.

The problem comes when the dash is among the numeric characters. Continue Reading »
The effect of dashes on the VAL() function

I normally install multiple versions of Crystal Reports on my current machine. This allows me to test reports for clients who may be using older versions of Crystal. Currently I have versions 8.5 through 12 on my Vista laptop and have only had minor problems running them. But as of this week versions 9 and 10 no longer load. I get an error related to keycode.dll. From what I gather I have to uninstall and reinstall these versions to solve the problem, but that means uninstalling 4 versions so that they can be reinstalled in chronological order. Fortunately version 8.5 still works fine and that is the one I use most after version 12. This is because 9-11 are all compatible with v12.

So, I can’t say for sure what caused the change because I haven’t used these versions in a few weeks, but I did get some updates from Microsoft just one day before those versions stopped working. If anyone else has recently seen this error drop me a note. Maybe we can figure out the cause.

I think today was the first time I showed someone a practical use for the Report Explorer. I was shown a PDF export that had a short stray line along the left margin. The line didn’t appear in the preview mode or in the design mode of the report, but I have seen strange things happen with objects. I have seen objects located “below zero” on the design screen (so far left they are off the form), or hidden completely behind layers of other objects. So, I figured the quickest way to find it was to look in the complete list of the objects in each section – the Report Explorer. That way I could Continue Reading »
Using the Report Explorer