What Assistance with Crystal Reports is Covered by Your Support Contract?

Bronze Level (legacy only), Silver Level, Silver Plus*, and First Year's Free Support

This level of support is designed to enable users to make simple modifications that will change the look of the printed output of a report. It is suitable for novice users of Crystal Reports. You can add a logo, change fonts, add text, and generally make changes to make the report look similar to your existing office paperwork. Users are not expected to have any expertise with databases, reporting packages or programming. We will assist with:

  1. Any errors or unexpected behaviour when printing standard (un-customised) reports from Eclipse.
  2. How to locate your reports for editing them.
  3. How to install reports and configure them for the Eclipse print menus.
  4. How to set the database location for all the tables in a report so that Crystal knows where to find the data in test scenarios.
  5. How to insert database fields, text fields, pre-defined formula fields and special inbuilt fields (page number, print date etc).
  6. How to insert graphics and draw lines and boxes.
  7. How to move and resize fields in a report.
  8. Advice on the location of database fields in Eclipse, e.g. the table name and field name.

Bronze level support is no longer available to new customers.

Gold Level, Gold Plus* Support

This level of support is aimed at users who have achieved some proficiency using Crystal Reports, or who at least feel comfortable referring to their Crystal Reports Manual and Help if they don't fully understand the instructions. Gold Level Support expects the user to take full ownership of the report editing process. They must be responsible for implementing the solutions to the problems they are trying to solve. It includes everything that you get with Silver Level Support plus the following :

  1. Assistance with adding more databases (tables) to a report and linking them to existing tables.
  2. Assistance with setting record selection formulas, in order to focus a report on specific data, either for testing purposes or for controlling what data the report retrieves when printing from Eclipse.
  3. Assistance with creating groups and sections in a report to control how and when data is displayed.
  4. Assistance with conditional formatting in reports, to control how and when data is displayed.
  5. Assistance with formula writing.
  6. Assistance with writing formulas for either record selection, formula fields or conditional formatting.
  7. Assistance with multi-currency formulas.
  8. Assistance with writing running total fields.
  9. Assistance with adding sub-reports.
  10. Assistance with adding parameter fields to reports.

Scenarios for Gold Level Support

Three scenarios below illustrate what level of service you can expect from Gold Level Support. In the scenarios the problems are similar but the customers' expectations of how the problem is going to be solved and what they are prepared to do to achieve that goal is different.

Scenario A describes a well managed support incident that is completely covered by Gold Support.

Scenarios B & C fall outside the remit of what we offer for Gold Support.

Scenario A

Customer: "I have added the crew allocation tables to my quote reports so that I can display the crew allocated to each crewing request. Having done this my crew totals are incorrect, in fact much greater than they should be; how can I fix this?"

Support: "Each crew request can have multiple people assigned to it. Your crew requests will be duplicated for each person assigned when Crystal Reports retrieves the data. So the same crew price will be added for each person allocated to it. The way to overcome this is to use a Running Total field to add up the {Crew.Total} field. Make sure the Running Total has the following options set:

Customer follow-up: "Thanks for that, it hints at the cause of my other problem. I added the names of allocated people to the details section of the report along with the general crew request information, and now the latter get repeated for every person allocated. How do I address that?"

Support follow-up: "This is why you have Groups in Crystal Reports: data in groups only gets printed when the data for the group's field changes. Crystal can only know if the data changes if the data is sorted by the group's field, so you also benefit by getting your data sorted by the groups field at the same time. To solve your problem follow these steps:

Customer follow-up: "Many thanks. Everything working fine now."

Scenario B

Customer: "I have added the crew allocation tables to my quote reports so that I can display the crew allocated to each crewing request. Having done this my crew totals are incorrect, how can I fix this?"

Support: "Each crew request can have multiple people assigned to it. Your crew requests will be duplicated for each person assigned when Crystal Reports retrieves the data. So the same crew price will be added for each person allocated to it. The way to overcome this is to use a Running Total field to add up the {Crew.Total} field. Make sure the Running Total has the following options set:

Customer follow-up: "I tried doing what you said but I go myself into a mess. Please find the report attached - could you do this for me as soon as possible. Thanks in advance."

Support follow-up: "I'm afraid your support contract does not include a report writing service. If you wish to commission the work the charge will be £XXX and we can turn it around within 24 hours of your order.

Scenario C

Customer: "Please find attached a report I am having problems with. I wrote a formula to calculate the deposit that our customer's have to leave when hiring equipment but it's not working on some jobs that I have tested it against. Can you find the problem?"

Support: "The formula looks fine, but it may have dependencies on data configurations, or some assumptions that you haven't told us about. I can probably find the cause of the problem for you but I will need your Eclipse data and some time to investigate it, so there will be a charge of £XXX if you would like me to proceed with this.

Extra Support for Reporting

Although we encourage users to do all their reporting work, we are able to offer report writing services for users who would prefer this option. This covers producing an entire suite of reports for a complete turn-key paper work solution, or just strategic assistance with one or two aspects of report writing that you are having difficulties with. Costs are given on application, but the base rate for report writing is £75.00 per hour. Please contact for more information.

Silver Plus* and Gold Plus*

Customers who have extended Eclipse modules: Multi-Site, Testing, or the Sales Book are required to purchase either the Silver Plus* or Gold Plus* support options.