I have written several posts regarding Zebra printers and the problems they have had with labels that rotate when they shouldn’t.  I read that this was fixed in CR 2008 with a recent service pack, but it isn’t clear if this was fixed for CR XI.   I just learned that Seagull Scientific provides free printer drivers for many zebra printers (and others).  These do not seem to have the problems with rotation that have been described, so that is another potential solution for some of you.

Update 11/30/2024:

This came up recently with a customer who had installed these drivers to solve the problem.  Even then it didn’t work at first until he ‘recalibrated’ the printer to the media. Then the issue was resolved.  Just in case someone else has a similar issue he shared the steps for the Zebra GK420d desktop printer:
1) Holding the feed button down
2) Wait until it blinks once, then blinks twice in quick succession.
3) Immediately release the button
4) It will automatically print out a few labels or so to figure out the dimensions.

(and thanks to Samuel Lindemulder of Kentwood Powder Coat for sharing these steps.)

I recently wrote about the disappearance from SAP’s website of most of the prior versions of CR, leaving only CR 2008 and CR 2011.  I am happy to report that version XI is now again available for sale.

What I didn’t notice at the time was that the XI maintenance releases were also taken down for both XIr1 and XIr2.  These have now been replaced by a single maintenance release called XIr2A.   You can read about this on the SAP Blog.  The impression that you get is that they are simply trying to consolidate the updates.  However, the update probably reflects whatever changes were required to deal with the ‘open source issues’ that forced SAP to discontinue the older versions.  If anyone gets more details on what the ‘open source issue’ is please let me know.

And thanks to David Hopaluk at Here2Help Solutions for pointing out the restored maintenance releases.

The Distinct Count summary function in Crystal Reports is pretty handy.  It allows you to count the number of unique values in a column.  It can eliminate duplicates from the count, even when the duplicates are NOT consecutive.

One of my customers wanted to do the same type of summary in an Excel spreadsheet.  We were both surprised that there was no function like this in Excel.  But after a few Google searches I came up with a workaround that lets an Excel formula do the same thing as the Distinct Count summary function in Crystal:

=SUMPRODUCT((A1:A99<>"")/COUNTIF(A1:A99,A1:A99&""))

You replace the three sample ranges “A1: A99” with  whatever your data range is.  I am not sure I could explain why it works, but it does.

I have had several customers recently that had trouble with error messages related to parameters, especially date parameters.  The error says “An error has occurred in the script on this page”.  Sometimes everything is fine if you let it continue anyway and sometimes it doesn’t.  But even then it is an annoying hurdle for users.

In my research I have found that there isn’t a clear consensus on the cause or the solution.  Different things seem to work in different environments.  So I have decided to summarize the various solutions that I have read about and put them in one place to help me remember what to try.  So if you are having parameter problems here are some things that Continue Reading »
Date parameter prompt errors

Ido Millet of Millet Software has added another powerful feature to an already feature rich product called Visual Cut.  Users now have the ability to automatically generate an Excel Pivot Table based on an exported (Data Only) excel worksheet.  If you use pivot tables then you might want to see this feature in action.  Ido has produced a video that shows how it works.

If you want to compare the features of Visual Cut to similar products you can read my comparison.

Or, you can try Visual Cut for free by sending an Email request.  Millet Software will respond with a download link and instructions.  Please let them know that you have read about Visual Cut in my Blog.