Say you have several columns of numbers that get added together like Price, Tax and Shipping. At the end of a customer group you would have three subtotals. You might decide to write a formula that adds those three subtotals together to get the combined total for the customer. It would work fine but there is usually a more efficient way to do this. Instead of writing a formula that combines the subtotals I would write a formula that combines the fields at the detail level. It would look like this: Continue Reading »
A total of a formula instead of a formula of totals.

People who create reports are always interested in metrics. This article in Forbes suggests five metrics that you will probably never see on one of your reports – but they still got some gears turning in my head.  Thought I would share.

This week I had a customer who was having trouble getting some version 8.5 reports to run on another another computer using CR v11.  The report wouldn’t connect to a new data source consistently.  So I gave him the following steps that seemed to clear up the problem. Here they are in case someone else has a similar situation.

Any time you need to run a v8.5 report in a later version of CR the first step is to change the version of the RPT.  To do this open the old report Continue Reading »
Running v8.5 reports in later versions of CR

Jeff-Net has released a free Edition of Report Runner viewer.   It is completely free, can be installed as many times as you like and doesn’t have any ads.  It is only missing 2 features that are included in their paid edition:

1) You can’t launch reports from the command line (batch files).
2) You can’t customize the interface

But otherwise it can do everything a report viewer should do (preview, print, export, refresh, etc).  To get your license you have to provide a company based Email address (not Hotmail/Gmail/etc.).  That’s it.

If you want to compare the features of Report Runner with the other free (and paid) viewers you can read my review of Crystal Reports Viewers, which I update every September.

When you specify field values in Crystal Reports formulas do you have to match the case?  Well, it depends on where you are. Take this example:

{Name} = “Joe”

It would only be true when the first letter was upper case and the other two were lower case.    So what if you have values in your data that use different case patterns?  You could get around the problem Continue Reading »
Case sensitivity in Crystal Reports