Crystal Reports: Quickly copy a format from one object to several others

So you’ve now set the defaults for new objects, how do you change existing fields or text objects to a common format? 

Firstly, rather than formatting each object individually, you can do them all at once using multiple object selection. What may not be so obvious is that if you already have a field formatted the way you want, you can quickly apply that to other fields.

To select multiple objects in a Crystal report, you can click on the first object and then hold down the SHIFT or CTRL keys and click on the other objects. Alternatively, draw a box around the objects you want to format and anything it touches will be selected. You can use either technique across multiple sections.

To change just one format property and leave all other formatting intact, use the formatting tool bar. To format all the common formats with the same format follow these steps in Design or Preview (not in a drilldown tab):

1. Select all the Text objects or the Field objects you want to format.
2. The object with the format you want must be the last one you select.
3. Do this in two steps if you want both Text and Fields changed as Text field formatting can take precedence.
4. Right click on that object and click on Format Objects.
5. The Format Editor window will display but you do not need to change anything. Click OK
6. All the objects will now be formatted the same as the last object in the selection.

Thanks to Melissa Smith of Aeronaut Industries and Brilliant Ltd in Sydney for this time-saving suggestion.

Now, there's a hitch in this handy time-saver. Thanks to Cindy Kredo, an accomplished online instructor at www.cindykredo.com, for bringing this to our attention.

Cindy says:

"This feature applies to version 8.0 and earlier. Beginning with version 9.0, the steps described do not work (sadly enough). When multiple formats have been applied to the selected objects, the user has to go into each desired format feature and make the manual change."

You can still do this in batch mode as recommended above, but it's no longer a simple click of the OK button.

To find out more about Cindy's services, see www.cindykredo.com

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