Some of our business partners need information sent to them in a comma-separated format (.CSV). Specifically, they want all the fields separated by commas and each of the individual fields enclosed in double-quotes ( " ). Crystal 10 would do that more or less by default, but Crystal 11 takes the Microsoft Excel approach, which is to only enclose fields in quotes that are not null (i.e. empty) and that are not numeric.
For example, given Name, Age, Sex, Religion, Title, the Crystal 10 default is:
"Smith, John","35","M","","Engineer"
and the Crystal 11 default is: "Smith, John",35,"M",,"Engineer"
A work-around can be used in Crystal 11 by setting up a formula, possibly named "all_fields," that looks like the following:
‘"’ & {name} & ‘","’ & {age} & '","' & {sex} & '","' & {religion} & '","' & {title} & '"'
Then, when it’s time to export the record, use the following options:
File > Export > Export Report > Separated Values (CSV) > Delimiter (blank / null) and Separator (blank / null) > Save as type "Separated values (*.csv)"
This will result in all the fields being comma-delimited and quoted.
Here’s the problem: Report Commander has no options to set the "Delimiter" and the "Separator" fields to null. Are there any plans to allow this in a coming release? Note that .TXT is not an option for exporting long comma-delimited records which have numerous fields because the records will be truncated even when using the maximum, landscape version of 11" x 17" paper.