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]

Hi Art,

After you made the changes to your chart, did you right-click on it to select "Apply Changes to All Charts?" If not, give that a shot.

Cheers,

-Michael

[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

[Former Member]

My "question" is just a rant not a real question!

[Former Member]

Hi Art,

I actually wrote a lot of the chart engine that is used in CR. Its a great chart engine that was not hooked up particularly well (The same engine shines much more nicely in Cognos and MicroStrategy products).

In fact, I was so frustrated with the CR implementation that I wrote an add-in for CR called CRChart that solves about 100 of the most common CR charting problems/issues.

It does cost money, but you may want to track down our website and play with the demo to see if it makes sense for you.

-Dan from threedgraphics.com

[Former Member]

Thank you Dan.

I will definitely check that out.

Art