3 Cross-Tab Crystal Reports Tips for Visual Studio 2010

Have you ever wondered how to get date fields to appear across the page when designing a Crystal Report?  So did we!  To do this, you are building what is known as a Cross-Tab Report, which is not something it, strangely enough, likes to do. 

Working with LiveOffice

In our most recent project, our environment consisted of a pre-ECC release of SAP, in a Retail Environment, with BW 3.5, connected to SAP BOBJ BOE, via LiveOffice.  From SAP BOE, again using LiveOffice, we connected to xCelsius (since renamed:) and by default, we were using Microsoft Excel.  What were the top three lessons learned:

1. Latest Patch Level.  All parts of the above tool chain have to be updated to the appropriate patch level. 
   
   You must not only research the PAM (Product Availability Matrix) to determine this, but the SAP Notes research tool on the service marketplace. 
   
   Don't forget, you will need to download the software download tool, which can be problematic.
   
   
2. Order Cells as Needed.  When you embed Cross-Tab Crystal Reports into xCelsius using LiveOffice, you can influence the way the fields are placed into the excel sheet within xCelsius to the get the order you want. 
   
   
3. User Authorizations Must Not Be Mismatched.  If you experience broken linkages after shutting down and restarting your system, you have mis-matches in your user authorizations. 
   
   Until you fix this, you will continually experience this and your development time will skyrocket. 

Builders of Interactive Dashboards

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