Last date for an invoice formula for Crystal Reports

Question

Post Author: jegva
CA Forum: Crystal Reports
I sure hope someone can help me write a formula to list only the last dated invoice from our database.  Let me explain, our sales would like a report listing all of our customers showing their last dated invoice.  We use SQL and Crystal Reports 8.5 (yea outdated).  They are interested in showing all our customers and their last invoice/date so they can try to contact those who have not done business for some time. Please help!!!!!!!

Answer 1

Hi Scott,
One reason is the older versions introduced a .5 font reduction in the viewers. This was a good thing for some but bad thing for others so I assume what the developers have done is leave the font as is and show those # symbols now to indicate the viewer you are using and font you are using works differently on the OS and the various viewers being used.
In CR designer it uses the GDI+ to render the data through classic C++ function calls. I .NET it too uses GDI+ but it's the Framework making the calls and the Framework handles screen mapping differently. We've had this issue/functionality limitations since version 9. Various reasons and various work arounds resulted in various outputs.
Another reason is the C++ viewer built into the Report Designer and the .NET framework handling the fonts work slightly differently when rendering. This has been tracked and few times here by me and in both cases the cause is GDI+ has bugs in it so it's nothing we can do. Post or log your issue with Microsoft, they may be able to fix it. Once they do then if it's still a problem in CR we can fix it depending on what MS does.
Another work around may be to use a fixed font like Courier or some other font that has a specified character area all characters use, it may make the characters space oddly but as for displaying it's always the same size.
All I can suggest is they get into a practice of testing their reports in your app before "publishing"
Thanks again
Don