Last year about this time I posted a chart that showed my newsletter subscribers and what versions of CR they were using when they signed up. I have decided to make this an annual post so you can get a feeling for which versions are being used and how quickly the new versions are catching on.  I have included numbers for 2013 but with only 2 months of data so far the sample size isn’t the same as the prior years.

What I notice is that CR 2011 (v14)  is starting to take over while CR XI (v11) is now starting to recede.  I think the slight jump in the oldest versions this year is a statistical fluke that will diminish as more data for the year accumulates.

CR versions over time

If you have been considering purchasing Find it EZ then you might want to do before the end of March. The developers of Find it EZ are offering my readers a 25% discount on purchases through 3/31/2013. Use this link to get the discount.  And they are planning a price increase in mid-March so if you use the link now there is an extra savings.

If you aren’t familiar with Find it EZ, it is a source code scanning tool that I have written about as part of my comparison of RPT management utilities.  It can search your entire application, including your RPT files, for the use of specific tables, fields and text.

The promotion this month is to highlight some recent updates. Find it EZ is now:

• certified to run on Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012
• certified for Citrix Server with floating license concurrent distributed user support
• certified for SQL Server 2012 and latest version of SSRS
• able to search your database by owner or schema
• able to scan within MS Query files

If you have tried it and have any feedback, please let me know.

If you have worked with charts you know that the font sizes can be a bit tricky. With most text objects and fields on a report, the font size is independent of the object size. You can make an object bigger but the font size doesn’t change.  But with charts, all font sizes are relative. Make a chart bigger and you automatically get bigger fonts for all the text in the chart.

This poses a challenge for getting labels or legend entries in your chart to be the same size as the text outside the chart. You can’t simply set them to the same number because the chart labels are relative. Setting it to size 10 may not Continue Reading »
Font sizes inside charts

I was working with one of my customers on reports they needed to deploy in Japan. The customer asked me how to convert the rulers in design and preview to use metric units. I had never done this before, but I knew there was a setting that mentioned this in the Page Setup window (File>Page Setup) so we went there first. That changed the page sizes to metric units but didn’t have any effect on the the design or preview rulers. Next we went to the “View” menu and tried changing the Product Locale to Germany, since that country uses metric units. This changed the ruler to metric, but it also put the entire menu and all the GUI labels into German. Right below this menu option is a similar menu item called “Preferred Viewing Locale”. It wasn’t really clear how this was different but we tried that next. That changed the rulers to metric without changing the language of the product.

On my own installation of CR I only have one option in Product Locale (English), but I have dozens of options in the “Preferred Viewing Locale”.  It appears that these are installed automatically, while the full Product Locales are only installed if you select them at the time of install.   My customer had the full list in both places.