Accurate totals in a Many-to-Many situation
While working with a customer I found a new way of totaling records when there is a Many-to-Many relationship. This method doesn’t use variables or subreports so it is quicker and simpler than other...
View ArticleRediscovering a long forgotten UFL
I have been writing about UFLs now for several years. So I was a bit chagrined this week when I realized that I have been hosting a UFL on my site since 2002 and never thought to include it in the...
View ArticleCrystal Reports formula function libraries (annual update)
It is time for my annual comparison of formula function libraries, and this year I have added a new one, which is actually a very old one. It has been hiding at the bottom of my LINKS page for a...
View ArticleA better way to suppress sections
Crystal allows you to write a formula to conditionally suppress a section. Recently I have found that there are several advantages to putting the suppress logic in a formula field instead of directly...
View ArticleStrange behavior with IIF
I found an interesting behavior the other day. A customer had written a formula that was hitting null values and failing. Normally I would do something like this: If IsNull ({FieldA}) then {FieldB}...
View ArticleMixing Number and Currency Values
A user was getting an error in a Crystal formula and asked me to take a look. The formula looked like this: {FieldA} / {FieldB} * 100 She was dividing one column by another to get a percentage and...
View ArticleDays between (excluding Sundays)
I recently needed a formula to calculate the number of days in a date range, while excluding all of the Sundays in that range. My plan was to calculate all the dates in the range, then calculate the...
View ArticleFormula for age in years and months
One of my readers needed this formula and even gave it a shot. But this is a tricky formula. I have had a version for years posted on my formulas page, but I hadn’t tried it for months so I took on...
View ArticleBetter way to change the row/column field of a cross-tab
I use cross-tabs quite a bit and there is one thing I find frustrating. It is when you have a perfectly laid out cross-tab and realize that the row or column field needs to be changed. Changing a row...
View ArticleSaved data vanishes when you narrow the criteria.
A user in Tek-Tips was puzzled. He was viewing reports with saved data and changing the parameters to filter the report in different ways. When the saved data was generated today, he could change the...
View ArticleFormula tips from a reader
After my last newsletter I received a note from James Flowers with some formula suggestions, and thought his comments along with my own might be helpful: 1) James likes to number the formulas in...
View ArticleConverting Crystal formula logic into SQL queries
I recently had to convert a complex Crystal Report into a SQL Query, including all the calculations. I eventually found ways to convert everything that was needed and learned some valuable SQL skills....
View ArticleAdding Google Maps to reports
I feel like a kid with a new toy. Ido Millet of Millet Software shared with me a method for taking any address in a report and using it to generate a map on that same report. The technique relies on a...
View ArticleCrystal Reports vs SSRS #3
Today’s comparison comes courtesy of Hessel de Walle, from The Netherlands. Much of his blog is in Dutch, but he has written two articles that compare specific tasks done in both Crystal Reports and...
View ArticleUsing a Report Custom Function
I did something for the first time this week. I wrote a report custom function to use in production report. I think of Custom Functions as being primarily useful if you have a repository and can use...
View ArticleAdding an index based on a cross-tab
Jamie Wiseman, one of the SAP bloggers, wrote up a clever way to create an index using a cross-tab and using the ‘Display String’ property. It uses some fairly complex formulas but I was surprised that...
View ArticleCrystal Reports formula function libraries (2013 update)
It is time for my annual comparison of formula function libraries. If you aren’t familiar with User Function Libraries (or UFLs) they are DLL files that add new formula functions to your Crystal...
View ArticleGrouping by multiple values in one record (multi-value field)
One of my customers asked me if there was a way to group records by product code. The tricky part was that each record contained several product codes entered as a list like this: A101, B201, C301...
View ArticleConverting a scientific notation string
One of my customers was reading data from XML. He ran into an amount field stored as a string and noticed that some of the values had been converted to scientific notation. They looked something like...
View ArticleCut Light brings VLookup to your formulas
A few months back a user asked me if there was a way to use VLookup() in a Crystal Report. At the time, I could not think of a way. But recently Millet Software has added this ability to the Cut Light...
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