Ten tips for Crystal Reports

Basic operations

When using the design tab, zoom to about 120 percent. This will make it easier to grab the 'handles' of the controls. The design and preview tabs have independent zoom settings, so changing the zoom in one of them won't affect the other.
To create more space for the report in the design tab, open the Options dialogue (on the File menu); on the Layout page, enable the 'Short Section Names' option. This will show an abbreviated version of the section name in the grey area to left of the design area, thus leaving more space for the report itself.

If you have a column of figures which include a currency symbol (such as Ł or $), you will improve the appearance of the report by not showing the symbol against every figure. Instead, place the symbol either in the column header or next to the figure on the first row in each page (to do so, open the field's Format Editor, choose the Number tab, click on Customize, go to the Currency Symbol page and enable 'One symbol per page').
You can get some interesting visual effects by using the Wingdings font that comes with Windows. This font includes bullets, arrows, icons and other fancy characters. To insert one of these characters into a report, open the Windows Character Map applet, select Wingdings from the list of fonts, click on the symbol you want, click Select, and finally click Copy. This will place the symbol in the Clipboard from where you can paste it into a text object.

You probably know that you can place fields and other objects inside a text field. This is useful in mailmerge-style operations, where you want to merge a value from a database into a piece of text. However, this technique should be used sparingly - especially with large reports - as it can greatly slow down the previewing of the report (but it does not affect the speed of printing or exporting).
If you need to view or print a report based on a small subset of data (for example, if your database table has tens of thousands of records but you only want to see a few hundred of them), keep your selection criteria as simple as possible. In particular, avoid using Crystal formulae in the criteria. If the criteria include Crystal formulae or any other syntax that the database cannot understand, the database server will send the entire table across the network, which could take a long time.
Keep in mind that sub-reports can have a bad effect on performance. If performance is an issue, try to reduce the use of sub-reports as much as possible.

If you have difficulty reading the text in the formula editor, open the Options dialogue (File menu), go to the Editors tab and choose a larger font size. You can also change the font (only fixed-pitch fonts are permitted here) and customise the syntax colouring. The choices you make here also affect the SQL Expression Editor.
If you want to prevent one or more lines of a formula from being executed but you don't want to delete them (for example, if you want to test the effect of not running part of the code), turn the lines in question into comments. To do so, type two forward slashes in front of the line(s) if you are using Crystal syntax; type a single-quote character in front of the line(s) if you are using Basic syntax. Either way, the code will be treated as comments and will not be executed. To restore the code, simply remove the slashes or the quote.
Going further, if you have a large block of code that you wish to turn into comments, highlight the block, then either press Alt-M or click the 'Comment / Uncomment Selected Text' button on the toolbar. Repeat the operation to remove the commenting.

For more advice on using CR, be sure to visit this site regularly.

Mike Lewis Consultants Ltd. January 2004.