Independent Data Consultancy
Unless you’ve been on an extended Christmas break with no TV or Internet, you’ll have heard of Intel’s recent troubles. While it’s true that most computers will not be noticeably affected, servers that read and write large amounts of data to disk will be impacted. In my world, that affects two things – databases and […]
I always enjoy tuning reports for customers. I guess it’s the same satisfaction that people get from doing crosswords – a problem is presented (poor performance), you just settle down and work through the problem bit by bit. First thing I do is to review the subreports. While a subreport can be an essential part […]
Sadly, the sparklines below no longer work as Google have turned off the charts. Image-charts looked like a good alternative, but they only server the images over https which Crystal still doesn’t support. It’s probably possible to do something clever with a web service, I’ll look if I get the time. I had an interesting […]
When you first start designing reports, you add tables using a wizard, work out the joins between the tables. Then you’re off. First report designed in no time at all. A few weeks later, you’ve designed all the easy reports. Then you learn to use subreports for that data that just won’t join. A little […]
I just had an interesting support question from a customer, and felt the need to put pen to paper. They’re finding that regular barcodes are getting too long, so want to switch to using QR Codes for their ID badges. They use Crystal Reports to print the IDs, so need a solution for Crystal Reports. […]
I recently met with a customer to discuss their requirements for some new Crystal Reports. In passing, they mentioned a problem they were having with the formatting of the Y-Axis on a chart. The problem was that the chart was being used to display a count, but values was displaying one decimal place which makes […]
Customer: Market Leading Leisure Organisation We planned and implemented data migration from multiple source systems into a final data warehouse from which Web Intelligence Reports were created using Universes. Some additional Crystal Reports were also created. Much of the data came from legacy systems so robust procedures were put in place to ensure the accuracy […]
Customer: FTSE 100 Utility The FTSE 100 Utility required very accurate formatting in Crystal Reports. The final reports were to be used for sending out quotes in both pdf and word format. As any frequent user of Crystal Reports knows, this can be an error prone task with seemingly trivial changes to a report changing […]
I recently wrote a Crystal Report for a customer that queried their recurring bookings for gaps of more than 45 minutes. Easy enough, just sort the report by booking time and use Crystal’s previous() and next() functions to work out when the gap’s too large. A little conditional formatting to hide the rows without gaps, […]
It’s long been a complaint that if you insert an image into Crystal Reports, the transparency is lost. It came up again in a support call from a customer. Glad to say I’ve found a solution – use Crystal Dashboard/Xcelsius. It works well too: Start up Crystal Dashboard, insert your various images, using the Excel […]
