Crystal Reports has exciting new features in it over Crystal Reports 10. In fact, until XI was released, many of you reading this book had previously been using version 8.5 and never upgraded because the changes for version 9 and 10 weren’t significant enough. But with the new features in this latest release, many people have upgraded to XI and are looking forward to the enhancements. The following sections give you an overview of the new features and list which chapters have more information about them

Whether you are an end user or an advanced Crystal Reports developer, we offer several methods of implementing barcodes in Crystal Reports to suit your needs:

1. For end users, our UFL (User Function Library) for Crystal Reports an easy to install and use plug-in
2. For technical users, our ID-Automation Formulas for Crystal Reports allow distribution of a crystal report without the need for the Bar Code UFL.
3. For developers using Crystal 9 or above, Report Custom Functions can be created from our formulas and placed into the Repository of Custom Functions.

Does RAD support Crystal Reports XI?
Yes and No. Currently only the Crystal Reports XI runtime is supported when RAD is updated to RAD 6.0.1.1 iFix001. The ActiveX control based Crystal Reports Embedded Designer in RAD will remain at Crystal Reports 10.
Since Crystal Reports XI runtime is supported, the runtime Java™ Reporting Component (JRC) libraries that are used to render the reports at run time will be updated to Crystal Reports XI level.

Most report developers will have a love-hate relationship with Cross-Tabs in their reports. They love the powerful summarization features and the ability to display data in rows and columns, but they hate the rigid formatting constraints associated with cross-tabs.

That is not to say that cross-tabs haven’t come a long way in the last few releases. There have been significant improvements to cross-tab formatting and behavior that make them a viable solution for displaying summarized data.

But if you need a more flexible method of presenting data, you may want to consider a “simulated cross tab”. The name says it all—a report with a simulated cross-tab mimics the familiar report layout with rows and columns, but underneath you actually use grouping and formula fields to display the data in the format you need.

I have a subreport whose detail section is comprised of 1 column of variable length text field rows. I've set Can Grow on, because each row could be from 1 - 5 lines once selected from the varchar2(2000) field in the database (and I don't want to make the text field really tall, and have 1 line rows take up 5 lines of space). I want about 1 blank
line between each row selected from the database... but with Can Grow set on, the blank space that I have established in my design section (by making the section bigger than the text field) gets eaten up by the
rows that have grown. So I end up w/ something like this: