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Crystal Reports Basics: Exporting Crystal Reports

This is based on the book, Crystal Reports: A Beginner’s Guide. For more detail and explanation, plus practice exercises, order the book here.

If you are exporting data from Crystal Reports, please read: Reports vs. data. The article you are now reading will help you understand the process, though engaging in it defeats the purpose of having a reporting system in the first place.

With Crystal Reports 7.0 and higher, you can export with data. If selecting this option in Crystal Reports 8.0 and higher for someone with Crystal Reports 7.0 and lower, be sure to Save As to the appropriate version of Crystal Reports.

You can save the report as a PDF. When exporting to this or other none-Crystal Reports formats, you will lose drill down, record selection, and other features.

Text file formats: Remember to remove extraneous information (headers and footers are often a problem, though headings are usually not), as it’s likely to be included in the wrong places. See Crystal Reports: A Beginner’s Guide for details on this. Here are some formats you can save to:

Character-Separated Values (CHR). You pick the delimiter (e.g., tab, comma, space). It does allow you to choose date and number formats.
Comma-Separated Variable (CSV). This is a standard format used by a wide variety of databases and spreadsheet programs. It does allow you to choose date and number formats.
Data Interchange Format (DIF). This standard format allows you to choose date and number formats.
Tab-Separated Text (TTX). Tabs are the delimiters, text and values are in quotation marks. It does not allow you to choose date and number formats.
Tab-Separated Values (TSV). Tabs are the delimiters, text and values are in quotation marks. It does allow you to choose date and number formats.
Paginated Text (TXT). Uses spaces and page breaks to try matching the report’s layout.

The book Crystal Reports: A Beginner’s Guide explains these formats, and others, in more detail. Other formats include those of various specific programs (e.g., Excel), in addition to other generic formats.

You can also export part of a report:

Export part of your report using a UFL

The report looked great. It had many pages showing each of the invoices prepared over the previous month. These were exported to a PDF and sent to a document management company for storage.

But then came the challenge. We needed a second document to list each invoice and page number of the master documents they appeared on.

Our collection of User Function Libraries came to the rescue. Using these inside a formula can create a disk file while the report is processing.

Our File Management Function Library can write a simple text file.
Our Grid UFL provides you the proper control of your Crystal Reports Export.
Our XML UFL library can write a xml document with the required information.

As they are all "WhilePrintingRecords" formulas, they can accurately include information such as the page number and print time.

This article is copyrighted by Crystalkeen, Mindconnection, and Chelsea Technologies Ltd. It may be freely copied and distributed as long as the original copyright is displayed and no modifications are made to this material. Extracts are permitted. The names Crystal Reports and Seagate Info are trademarks owned by Business Objects.