Sometimes there are details printing on the last page and sometimes the last page is just the Group or Report Footer.  You may not want column headings on the last page if there are no details.  I have seen and tried several methods to accomplish this but not all are reliable. For instance using “OnLastRecord” as a suppress condition will work most of the time, but will also suppress the headers when the last page still contains exactly one detail record. I have found the approach below to be the most reliable.

First you split the Details band into A and B subsections.  You suppress Details B and use Details A for your visible fields.  Then you create the following formula field and place it in Details B:

WhilePrintingRecords;
BooleanVar Ending := OnLastRecord

Last you use the following formula to suppress the Page Header, or the part of the Page Header with column headings:

WhilePrintingRecords;
BooleanVar Ending

A Boolean variable is False by default.  The variable will only be True once the report has passed the last Detail A, which means that the last record has printed.  If there is a page header after that point it will be suppressed, because the “Ending” variable is now True.

I had a customer recently complain about a report not exporting correctly to Excel (Data Only). The column headings worked correctly in preview but were re-arranged in the spreadsheet in a seemingly random fashion.

My first thought was to make sure that they were all the same width as the field below them and precisely aligned with the fields, but this didn’t solve the problem. Then I aligned their bottom edges but again this didn’t solve the problem.

Then I noticed that the headings that moved to the right were all text objects that were either two rows or three rows deep, making them taller than the other headings. The tallest headings moved further to the right, which meant that it had something to do with the position of the top edge. So I made all the heading objects the same height and then aligned their top edges. At that poing they all exported to Excel in the correct order.

Note that this only affects Excel exports that are “Data Only”. Of course this is the option that I use 99% of the time.

Crystal makes it easy to reduce the number of decimals that you display for numeric values. There are two buttons on the toolbar (near the percent sign) and these allow you to either reduce or increase the decimals displayed. When you reduce decimals the remaining digits will either round up or down based on the digits no longer displayed. In other words, if you are showing 75.28 and you click the button to reduce the decimals displayed by one, the value will display as 75.3. This is because the hidden 8 causes the value to round up to the next 1/10th.

However, this is deceptive. The underlying value in the report is still 75.28. And if you were to total that column or use that value in a calculation the value used would still be 75.28. This can give unexpected results, because the visible total at the end of the report might not reflect the sum of the visible values that go into that total. For that reason, I call this ‘fake’ rounding. You will find the same type of issue in Excel spreadsheets.

Most of the time, this isn’t an issue. And many people who read financial statements understand ‘rounding errors‘. But there are cases where you need ‘real’ rounding. Real Rounding requires writing a formula that uses the Round() function. For instance, if you have to apply a tax rate to a purchase and the calculated tax amount.  You could use a formula like this:

{Sales.Charge} * {Sales.TaxRate}

But if the tax value has more than two decimals, those extra decimals aren’t real.  Most transactions have to be rounded to the nearest penny. In these cases you would need a formula like this:

Round ( {Sales.Charge} * {Sales.TaxRate} , 2 )

This rounds the tax to the nearest penny.  If you used the first formula and created a total of the tax values, the total would include all the fictional fractions of a penny.  If everything was displayed with two decimals the total tax would not match the individual tac values, because those would be using fake rounding to display only two decimals.  But if you use the second formula and then create a total of that formula the total should reflect the visible values.  The total calculation is using values that display the same number of digits as the underlying value.