Crystal Reports: PDF Export

With the PDF being such a popular way of sharing documents, it's only natural that many Crystal Reports users want to output their Crystal Reports as PDFs. How can you do this?

Well, Crystal Reports 8.5 (and higher) has a PDF export function built in. That is one solution, but simply adding the PDF export ability is not a compelling enough reason to go through the cost and hassle of the upgrade if you are already using a previous version. Fortunately, several other solutions exist:

1) Buy and install a general-purpose PDF printer driver. This has two downsides. One, the Adobe versions are very expensive. Two, the ones made by other parties can cause programs to exhibit undesirable behavior--for example, one such driver requires a reboot if you close an application it is tied to and wish to open that application again.

2) Buy our CR9 version of cView, a crystal reports viewer. Use it to view your report, and manually export to PDF. If you are running CR 7, the CR9 run time files installed with cView 9.xx will coexist with your CR7--so no problems there. Do not download and install the Cr8.xx version as that will upgrade some of your Cr7 files to CR8.5.

3) If you want to automate your report production, use cViewMANAGER or cViewSERVER to export and email your PDF’s. Same rules as for cView–install the 9.xx version.

The PDF export from within CR was first announced with CR8.0, but sadly missed the release date. A patch file for that was available briefly, but was removed from their Web site when CR8.5 appeared (which did include PDF export)--it will not work with CR7.

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Here is the announcement we made back in 2001:

Version 8.5 feature

A PDF document enables you to retain the format and presentation of your report, but does not allow your recipient to make any changes or convert the report to another format.

One of the popular new features in CR8.5 is the ability to export your report to PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format. This feature was available as a download for CR8.0 users, but cannot be installed in earlier versions.

You can export in other formats, also. But is this what you want to be doing with your Crystal Reports system? Probably not. For one thing, you lose drilldown. For another, a properly designed report will provide the answers users seek. If your report is merely a fancy way of presenting raw data, or if users want data instead of your report, there is something wrong with your report.

To fix this problem, ask users what business questions they need answered. They should not be spending their time manipulating data. They should have their business questions answered by your report, so they can do the work they are paid to do.

It may be true, however, that your relational database -based reporting system can't provide the analysis abilities your users need. If that is the case, consider implementing an OLAP system.

All the time users spend playing with spreadsheets is not going to provide answers your reporting system can't provide, as spreadsheets are a step down from relational databases. Users probably don't realize they are going backwards, not forwards.

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