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April 2005
 Welcome to our newsletter!
The Repository comes out every 6 - 10
weeks. It features Crystal tools tips and tricks, news about Crystal
Reports, Crystal Enterprise and Crystal Info. Check our Promotions section
for upgrades, implementations and training. This month's highlights:
- I Didn't
Know... - your Crystal
knowledge resource. Look for tips and tricks from George Peck's
Crystal Reports Professional Results and from you (when you
send them in), our subscribers.
- Crystal Decisions User
Group of North America Ceases Operations - CDUGNA "closes its doors". Details were emailed
by CDUGNA's webmaster on April 4, 2005. More in our News section.
- RMOUG Training Days
2005 - IT
professionals from across the United States attended this successful
independent Oracle user conference in Denver. Read all about it in our
News section.
- Monthly Online Learning
Series - Participate
from work, from home, on the road. Learn from "the guy who wrote the
book". See our Promotions section.
Questions and suggestions? email
us - we look forward to hearing from you.
Visit our newsletter archive
for past
issues.
... I could
automatically complete parts of my formula.
One of the
features of some programming environments is automatic completion of
programming statements as typing occurs. These environments attempt to
anticipate what the programmer is typing and either automatically complete
portions of the programming statement or present a set of choices that can
be easily chosen without typing the entire programming statement character
by character.
Crystal Reports 9 has added this feature to the Formula Editor. Now,
when you press a special key combination when editing a formula, Crystal
Reports will present you with a logical set of choices. By making a choice
from a list, you can reduce the amount of manual typing or double-clicking
in the Function or Operator tree.
This feature is available only in Crystal Reports 9 and later.
- Begin typing your formula.
- At any time you may get a list of probable functions or operators
that you may use by pressing CTRL-SPACE.
- The list that appears is based on what you've already typed. If you
press CTRL-SPACE before typing anything, or after a space in a formula
statement, every possible formula keyword appears in the list.
- If you've typed a few characters before pressing CTRL-SPACE, the
list of available keywords that matches the letters you've already typed
appears in the list.
- You may choose one of the choices from the list in several ways:
- Double-click the choice
- Use cursor keys to choose the desired choice. Then press TAB,
SPACE, or ENTER
- Continue typing characters with the list visible. When you've
typed enough unique characters to narrow down to one choice in the
list, that keyword will be autotyped for you.
- Continue creating your formula as you normally would - either by
choosing options from the Formula Editor trees or typing. You may press
CTRL-SPACE at any time to present another list of possible keywords.
... about creative
date-based record selection.
Automatic date
range reporting is a handy feature of Crystal Reports, especially when
reports are scheduled to run on a regular basis in Crystal Enterprise.
When you add a date or date-time field to the Crystal Reports Select
Expert, an additional “In the Period” category will appear in the first
drop down list. When you choose this category, Crystal Reports built-in
date range functions will appear in the second drop-down list. These
functions, such as MonthToDate, Next30Days, Calendar1stQuarter, and so
forth, make use of your computer’s system date to determine the actual
range of days the function returns.
However, not all common date ranges are included in these built-in
functions. In particular, a requirement recently was presented us that
required a report to include a full month of records, regardless of when
during the month the report was run. For example, if the report was run
any day in December, the report needed to return records between December
1st and December 31st. If the report ran any time during February of a
leap year, it needed to return records between February 1st and February
29th. However, if it ran in a non-leap year, the end date needed to be
February 28th.
Use the following record selection formula to automatically return a
full month of data, regardless of when during the month the report runs
(you’ll need to use the Report | Selection Formulas | Record option with
this formula—it can’t be used with the Select Expert):
<{Date Field}> In
Date(Year(CurrentDate), Month(CurrentDate),1) To
DateAdd("m",1,Date(Year(CurrentDate),
Month(CurrentDate),1)) – 1
Crystal
Reports 8.5 and later are even “smart” enough to evaluate the built-in
Date functions and convert this to a correct WHERE clause against your SQL
database. Note, however, that Crystal Reports 8 and earlier probably won’t
convert this to a WHERE clause, which may cause poor report performance.
Tips and
tricks are brought to you by Crystal
Reports Professional Results and you, our readers. You can win a
copy of Crystal Reports Professional Results or Crystal Reports:
The Complete Reference and see YOUR name here. How? Just email your
favorite Crystal tip, trick or technique. If it's selected we'll include
it and your name in the next release of The Repository and we'll send you
a copy of either Crystal Reports Professional Results or Crystal
Reports: The Complete Reference.
email
your favorite Crystal tip, trick or technique.
 No More
CDUGNA Conference
You may have received an
e-mail from Crystal Decisions User Group of North America announcing its demise. This is not
entirely surprising, considering the acquisition of Crystal Decisions by
Business Objects (which conducts its own annual user conference). The
national user group conducted its last annual independent user conference
this past May in New Orleans. Thereafter, Business Objects was apparently
unwilling to support an independent conference and the volunteer CDUGNA
Board of Directors didn’t feel they had the resources to continue without
them.
For a number of years, we were very active with this independent user
organization, even serving as “Partner Advisor” to the Board of Directors
for a number of years. While you certainly can pay good money to hear the
“company line” at a vendor-controlled conference, we always thought an
independent conference provided a more balanced, “real world” view of the
Crystal software products. We still think this is the case.
We continue to participate as presenters with independent regional user
groups around the country. We also still think there’s room for a larger,
independent national conference. If you agree and would be interesting in
helping to form a replacement national group, we’d love to hear from you.
Call or email
us.
Rocky Mountain Oracle User
Group Training Days 2005
The largest independent
Oracle user event in the United States took place February 9 and 10 at the Denver Convention
Center. Over 800 information technology professionals attended top-notch
training conducted by 85 presenters. Training content was grouped into 8
categories: Application Design, Application Development, Data Warehousing,
Database Administration, Enterprise Systems, Professional Development,
Technology Management, and Web Internet/Intranet. During breaks and
lunchtime participants enjoyed the exhibition floor. They visited 30
IT-related exhibitors to learn about and discuss training, consulting,
hardware, software and many other products and services. Keynote speakers
were Oracle’s Thomas Kurian, and Jonathan Lewis of JL Computer Consulting.
Mr. Kurian highlighted the new features of Oracle Applications Server and
Internet Developer Suite 10g Release 2, and Mr. Lewis discussed methods
for finding reliable information about Oracle in the public domain.
The Rocky Mountain Oracle User Group presents their annual Training
Days session each winter, as well as smaller sessions throughout the year.
If you are an Oracle user in the Rocky Mountain area, you may find this
organization to be beneficial. Visit www.rmoug.org.
Monthly
Online Learning Series
Join George Peck Online
The Ablaze Group proudly announces the Online Learning Series.
Presented monthly, these webinars will feature George Peck discussing
Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise topics with a follow-up email
question and answer period. Interested? Email us now with topic
suggestions. We're still in the planning stages and your input will make a
difference.
Call or email
for details.
Our
Books
Crystal Reports 10: The Complete Reference
George Peck's 5th
Complete Reference book is available in stores and online.
Sample chapters and downloads.
Crystal Reports
Professional Results
It's the complete collection of
methods and techniques.
Take a look at the book.
Call or email
for details.
Consulting
Ablaze Group CE & CR
Support - Buy It By The Block!
Call or email
for details. Training
Pick & Choose
Pick the topics to be covered and choose the amount of time to spend
on them. Build one-of-a-kind courseware that focuses on your group's
demands. Want to concentrate on Business Views, Advanced Formulas and The
Repository? How about Web Reporting and Performance Fine Points? Pick and
choose what you want to learn and build the courseware! Our courseware
includes Crystal Reports: The Complete Reference. Use it
during class - rely on it at work. This is an Ablaze Group exclusive.
Call us at (800) 773 3472.
Take a look at our course outlines.
Call or email
for details. |
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