I just figured out how to solve an annoying Crystal bug that I have seen, on and off, for years. This bug has to do with text objects that are added using the default font of Arial 10. I don’t see this issue every day but it happens regularly with some customers and even on my own machine.

What happens is that a new text object gets horizontally squished. The characters are sized correctly, but the horizontal space from one character to the next is only about 10% of what it should be, so the characters overlap. You don’t see the problem while you are typing the text (Before), but as soon as you click outside the text object you see the squish (After).

Today I found a report that had this issue, and took the time to experiment.  Here are some factors that might contribute to the problem:

• The report is opened on a PC that uses a different printer driver than the design PC.
• The report is opened on a PC that has a different version of Crystal.
• Your default font for text objects is set to Arial 10 (and possibly other fonts).

If you add a new text object to the report under these conditions, you might see the squish.  For a long time I would have to change the font, change the style (to bold) or change the font size to correct the problem. But now I know two quick ways to eliminate the squish.

1) Go into File > Page Setup, don’t change anything, and click OK.

or

2) Save the report, close it and reopen it.

Either of these should get the font calculations back in line with the new printer driver.

If anyone runs into this situation (or something similar) and the above methods don’t work, please let me know.

Last summer I posted a draft of an improved formula for calculating business hours between two dates. It was meant to replace formula #13 on my formulas page, but I was waiting to do some additional real-world testing. Yesterday I got a good test case when a customer asked me to tweak the original formula to deal with start and end times outside the business day. I cleaned up a few typos and updated my formulas page.

This new version lets you separately specify a business start time and business end time for each of the 7 days of the week. It also includes additional logic to deal with events that start and/or end outside the business day (e.g. on a weekend, a holiday or after hours). The formula is now about 70 lines long. Fortunately, you only need to make changes in the first 20 lines or so. Here you specify:

• The DateTime fields to use for the Begin and End of each event
• The business start and end times assigned to each day of the week
• The list of holiday dates, which you can enter for multiple years

The output is a numeric value in hours as a decimal. If you want to show the value in “HH:MM” format you can use the “Elapsed Time String” formula on my site to convert this value into that format. Remember to multiply this formula’s result by 3600 since the input for the “Elapsed Time String” formula is seconds.

If you need help implementing this formula or any of my formulas you can always call to schedule a short consult.

I work with many different CR users. It seems that whenever I open the Report Explorer view in Crystal Reports, the user is a bit surprised. I get the impression that not many people use or know about this feature. I wrote about it once before (a decade ago) but since then I have found two more uses that I tap into regularly.

1) Selecting one of several superimposed objects.
One report I created for an educational assessment company had 4 superimposed picture objects in different colors. They were all in the same spot, but had suppress conditions so that only one would appear at a time. Trying to select a specific one of these objects is a challenge. But when you open the Report Explorer for that section, the objects are listed separately. You can select the object in the list of the Report Explorer and it behaves the same as when it is selected in design mode. You can also right-click on the object in the list and get all the same options you would get if you right-clicked the object in design mode.

2) Locating subreports
I recently had a very crowded report and was having trouble with a shared variable, that came from a subreport. The trouble was that the subreport was small and I was having trouble finding it. One of the features of the report explorer is that you can decide which of three object categories to have it show (Grids and Subreports / Fields / Graphic Objects). By turning off Fields and Graphic Objects the list showed only Grids (cross-tabs) and Subreports. This made the one lone subreport simple to find.

So if you haven’t ever used the Report Explorer, go into the View menu to activate it. You might find it useful.

I have decided to make my Intro course materials available to download, for free. There are several reasons behind this decision:

1) Crystal use is slowly declining. This might encourage use of the product in a small way.
2) Classroom training was becoming rare, and stopped completely by the pandemic.
3) My work is now mostly consulting, so there is less call for course materials.
4) I hope for some good karma.

So you are welcome to download the materials and use them. Share them with your friends. Please do not modify them or try to sell them.

Note that as a consultant, people often pay me to help them use or learn Crystal. You can, too. So if you have questions about Crystal Reports I am happy to schedule a short consult for you. This is explained further on these links:

https://kenhamady.com/faq.shtml
https://kenhamady.com/support/default.html