Charting Format and Label Problems

[Former Member]

I have spent most of a very frustrating day working with Crystal charts. I have bar and line charts placed in group headers. The data generates seven pairs of charts. The substance of each chart - the actually data plot - looks great. But problems arise when you try to modify labels or formatting:

1. Changes to the Chart Expert, such as adding a Title or Subtitle, are not always reflected in the actual charts. Sometimes the titles appear in only some of the instances of the seven charts. Weird.

2. In the Preview mode, formatting changes can be made that seem to apply only to that particular instance of the chart! In other words, Charts 1-3 could have a 12 pt Blue title and Charts 4-7 10 pt Red. What happens when the report is run on other data? What does Chart #8 look like? Is the formatting associated with the Group ID's or the chart "number"? I understand conditional formatting - would this be called conditional manual formatting? What were the developers thinking?

3. My X-axis labels were too wide and ran together. There is a function that skips every one or two labels, and that is what I used. First I tried the Chart Expert from Design Mode. For some reason the change took effect in only two of the seven charts. So in Preview mode I made the same change, chart by chart. OK, that worked. Then later I decided to remove the Title from each chart (choosing to place the title outside of the chart). Once again I had to do this chart by chart. Even worse, as soon as I removed the title, my X-Axis label settings (skipping every two) reverted back to the default, and now are unreadable again.

I am sorry to make such a negative posting. But Crystal is a great program. It is like the developers just threw something together when it came to Charting.

I am using Crystal 11.0.0.1994. Perhaps there are some fundamental concepts I don't understand. Are there fixes that can be downloaded for some of these problems?

Art

[Former Member]

Hahha! well atleast now we know we can rant on here too )). CR has alot of hidden bugs which might be fixed by next year when the new version comes out ))

Regards

Jehanzeb