Problem with extra columns at page breaks when exporting to excel

[Former Member]

I'm new to Crystal Reports, so I'm still learing, so bear with me. I have a crosstab report that is pretty wide and goes beyond the standard 1 page width. I am trying to get this report set up to schedule an export to excel. I changed my page setting in my printing prefferences to account for the width by changing the width to 36", and this works great, but as soon as I close out and go back in, it defaults back to the original settings and adds and extra column where the page break would be in the report. Is there any way around this? I have the 'Create page breaks for each page' option unchecked on the export options, but it doesn't seem to be working.

Any ideas?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

The best thing to do when preparing a template is evaluate which fields will be most common too all reports you will produce... make one that you can dynamically link to different output tables from server queries. If you have that kind of background that it.

Just setup the initial page to be the standard 36" x 36" document... don't bother with trying to set page breaks in crystal... it won't work very efficiently. If you are exporting to Excel, then it won't matter, because once you setup the Excel sheet the page breaks will be different anyway. If you export on a fixed column width of 36 points you can always expect that a field that is more than .5" too just under 1" by the ruler in Crystal will come out to about 2 columns in Excel.

You may also want to force date values to strings if you export fields with lead zero entries.

The reason I suggest that you ignore page breaks in Crystal is based entirely on our own report types - we can generate anything form 10 line reports, to 1000 line reports from the same source. If you know you are working with a fixed constant then you can setup an exact page export.

Not using the guide lines and snap points will cause you even further headaches in the excel export - you will frequently end up with gaps between columns and phantom lines that are unsightly and difficult to track down.

Edited by: Forrest Pugh on Oct 21, 2008 11:46 PM

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thank you so much for the advice! I really appreciate it.

[Former Member]

From my experience... no. Your original page setup is not something you can simply change from the page setup - at least not once you have used it too export. You can try to copy the fields too a new report which you have remembered to setup correctly before hand... that's probably not what you really want to do though is it?

We have a lot of report templates with the same problem.... we are not looking forward to the process of recoding them either. For the copy and paste solution, I sincerely hope you have learned that Guidelines and Grid-Snap are definitely your friends when using Crystal.

[Former Member]

So there is a way to set up a template without page breaks? I'm just getting started with Crystal and if there is a way to set up a template to account for this problem, I'm all for it! Is there a tutorial or anything that you know of that I could reference?

And no, I'm not familiar with Guidlines and Gridsnap.??? But I'm certainly going to google them next!

Thanks for your help!

[Former Member]

I dont mean to sound rude, but I can overcome some creative obstacles around my problem. My true question was "Is there a way to exclude page break formating when exporting a report to excel?" If the expert forum is not aware of a solution, I'll except that.

[Former Member]

Make sure that you have the paper size set up on the print driver. Also, in the section expert make sure new section after, and underlay following sections is turned off. If it is run on multiple machines make certain that each one has the same printer and printer driver settings.

[Former Member]

The settings are set on my printer drive, but as soon as I log out of Crystal and back in, it defaults the settings even though they're still correct in my printer drive? Also, I'm not sure that adjusting the print drive settings is going to correct the format of the report once it's published and viewed through Infoview. Is there settings within the report that can fix this problem?

[Former Member]

Jessica, I had the similar problem. My production department wants all their reports in excel format, however when I produce reports in Crystal and export to excel the column exceed its range no matter what I do.

So what did I do?

I squeezed the length of my crystal report columns for example

Reason Code - Description - Total Jobs - Total Lenses - Percentage Jobs - Percentage Lenses

Becomes

Reason - Description - Total - Total - % Jobs % Lenses

Code Jobs Lenses

Because the data underneath is integer and string, it fits into the range.

Now when I export my report to excel it works out perfectly.

Try it and see if that works out for you.

Regards

Jehanzeb

[Former Member]

Thanks for the advice, but the report is much to large to try and fit onto one sheet and still maintain a proper appearance for display when it's not getting exported to excel.

[Former Member]

Only option would be to have one copy of the report for viewing (Report for Viewing) and another for export to Excel (Report for Export to Excel).

Leave the viewing report all neat and tidy and make the suggested changes (squeezing the columns so that they're more narrow in the report itself) to the report for exporting.