Crystal Report viewer Reditributable for Visual Studio 2008

I developed a Crystal Report viewer windows application however I can’t find the correct redistribution package for client installation (BTW the SAP’s website really really S**ks!).

Finally I found it here:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages\CrystalReports10_5\

And it worked like a charm.

A few tricks working with Crystal Report Designer

• Holding CTRL key, you can select multiple objects and copy/move then as a whole group.  This is very useful when you have to make more space to add more columns, or copy columns from another report.
• Sometimes after the data is exported to Excel, some (newly added) columns will mysteriously appear at the end of the Excel file, instead of in their intended location in design view. To fix it,  select these column headers, use UP arrow key to move them out the page header, then move back so that there is 0 top margin.
• When export to Excel file in data only format, always uncheck “Simplify page headers”, otherwise some column headers will disappear.

Inserting background picture to Crystal Report

I don’t know if this is only my dev machine – the background picture disappears after I reopen the report.

There are a few jpg files I want to use as the background of my report. I used Insert->Picture, then select the file. Everything looks good (move to back). However after I close and re-open the report, the picture is blank. I can tell the object is still there (by the blue
border when move mouse over) however it’s just blank. Double clicking won’t activate the edit mode.

I found that, in order for this picture to retain, I have to insert the picture to a Word file first then copy it in memory from Word. Copying from MSPaint doesn’t work. Has to be Word. After inserting I had to adjust the size a little bit and the report file size is also much smaller than the version which I directly inserted picture file to.