Crystal Reports Archive

Regional BO Crystal User Groups Alive and Thriving

By
Paul
Published: August 25, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, Crystal Reports, Xcelsius, Xcelsius End UserTags: , ,
Regional BO Crystal User Groups Alive and Thriving

In the last two months, I have attended three regional independent BusinessObjects and Crystal User Group Meetings that have simply been amazing both in terms of their content and user participation. One was in Pennsylvania, one in Michigan and one in Arizona. Each one had between 50 to 70 attendees, was hosted at a customer site and was free to attend.
More significantly, each one had real world case studies and live demonstrations of solutions, many presented by customers, that were both educational and useful.
A gentleman from the State of Michigan presented his experiences in using Xcelsius while teaching the do’s and don’ts to novice and new users that was as entertaining as it was informative.
A demonstration of the new Web Intelligence 4.0 brought rounds of applause when showing the new graphics and “print to page” features.
A session on converting Desktop Intelligence to Web Intelligence documents had attendees captivated and taking copious notes on their iPads.
A manager from a Fortune 50 company presenting and demonstrating a case study of a new distributed dashboard they developed for one of their clients that has both saved them and their client significant time and resources was just sensational.
However, there was one presentation that just completely blew me away and left the audience awestruck. It was about advanced data visualization in BusinessObjects and how to create more visual graphic representations in Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence and Xcelsius. Creating heat maps in Crystal Reports was pretty cool, but creating animated Venn Diagrams in Xcelsius was just phenomenal. If everyone’s jaw had not dropped far enough, the presenter then shared a small personal project he had been working on that left us all speechless.
He kept a betta fish in a tank in his office and he used a web cam along with some software he downloaded from the internet to track the movements of his fish over a 24 hour period. The software allowed him to load all these coordinates into a database. He then accessed this database through Xcelsius to create a playback animation of the movements of the betta fish that could be sped up, slowed down and even add in a 5 second bubble trail to show more precise movement! The audience was stunned and I was so completely lost for words that the only question I could ask was “What was the name of his fish?”. It’s name was “Betta” as simple and as brilliant as the solution itself!
So I have to say that these BusinessObjects Crystal regional user group meetings are just the best thing going on out there right now in the BusinessObjects community. The education, innovative ideas and uniqueness of these gatherings is just unparalleled . I can’t wait till the next one!

Text Formatting Your Way in Crystal Reports

By
InfoSol
Published: February 24, 2010Posted in: Crystal Reports, Tech TipsTags:
Text Formatting Your Way in Crystal Reports

Question: Have you ever created a formula, to build a string of text, and wanted to format parts of it separately?

Answer: Use HTML codes to format your string.

Explanation

This Tech Tip uses the Customer Table from the Sample Database that comes with Crystal Reports.

The easiest way to format a text object is to right-click on it and select “Format Text…” from the context menu. Unfortunately, this only allows you to format all of the text the same way. You can make everything bold, change the font style and size, and underline it, etcetera. But, what if you want to only bold certain parts?

Well, you could make several text boxes and format them separately, but that is a lot of work and it doesn’t look nice. More advanced users may have noticed that you can double-click into the text object and format parts of text separately. You can even drag in other objects like summaries, database fields and special fields. These can all be formatted separately also. The problem here is that you can only change certain formatting once you drag the object into the text object. It will then be considered text and only simple text formatting options will be available like bold and size. So what happens if you summary rounded to two decimal places and later the report owner wants it changed to a whole number? You would have to create a new summary, drag it onto the report, format it and then replace the old one in the text object with the new one.

Now, let’s say you decided to build your text using a formula. Maybe you want to use functions to do your formatting such as Round() or ToText()? Maybe you just needed to build a complex formula to get the results of your text string. In any case, once you put your formula field on the report and try to format it, you are back to formatting changes that affect all of the text. Or, are you?

By incorporating a few HTML tags into your text string, you can give some parts your special touch. Here is an example of using a formula to print the Data Date in your page footer. Follow the steps and try for yourself:

Step 1:  Create a new formula to display your text. In this example, we will name our formula “dtData Refreshed”. Like the example above, we will bold just the date and time. The formula for doing this is:

Step 2:  Place the new formula field in the Page Footer.

Step 3:   Right-click on the formula field in the report and select “Format Field…”

Step 4:  Using the Paragraph tab, change the “Text interpretation” to HTML Text. As you may have noticed from our formula, you must surround your HTML tags with quotes so that they are a part of the text string. The end result of the formula will be all text and interpreted as HTML.

You’re done!

 

CaveatsNot all HTML tags are created equal. Most of the tags associated with text formatting (ex. bold, italics, font color/size/style) are supported. However, not all HTML tags are supported. As newer versions of Crystal Reports are released, more tags have been included. Please check the Crystal Reports support site for a listing of supported HTML tags for your version of Crystal. SAP Note 1217084 is a good place to start.

If you have ever used ChrW(10) or ChrW(13) to force a new line in your formula, you will need to use “<br>” instead. Yes, line breaks are supported. The sad part is that bulleted and numbered list are not supported in most versions.

So, how exactly did I get the red “Feb” in the date above? Well, that took a little more coding. Here is the code that I used. Of course, I could have simplified things using a variable, but instead, I just used cut-and-paste.