Crystal Reports exports to Word and Excel in no native encryption

[Former Member]

Hi there!

I'm working with Crystal reports in a web application (ASP.NET) and I have some problems with exporting documents to Excel And Word.

The problem is that Crystal generates very big files (in terms of size) because it doesn't use Word and Excel native encryption (i.e: When you export to word, it creates RTF documents instead of native word files).

I noticed that, because when I opened the generated file in Excel or Word and saved the files, the size of that files decreased a lot. (The size of one generated Word file by Crystal can change from 200 Mb (RTF) to 5Mb (native Word encryption). I saw in some forums that this issue is because Crystal removed native Word and Excel encryption in the export process.

Is there any way to export these type of files with the native Office encryption?

Additional information:

Visual Studio 2010

Crystal Reports 32 bits 13.0.0.99

Crystal Reports 64 bits v13.0.3.612

Thanks in advance,

Emilio

[former_member11696 · Accepted solution]

Also, you are using the original release of CR for VS 2010, time to upgrade to SP 3. You can get the update form the Overview tab. SP 4 is available but there is a formatting issue when previewing the report so stick with SP 3 for now.

Don

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Don,

Thanks for your answer. I'm currently using the CR for VS2010 with SP3, but is doesn't matter because the Crystal report runtime is the component that exports the files to Word and Excel formats (Crystal Report Runtime is the only necessary component installed at production server).

Emilio

[former_member11696 · Accepted solution]

Hi Emilio,

Actually you should develop using the smae version as the redist packages, there are new API's added and some reworked so it's always recommented to match DEV/REdist.

Crystal has not had a Native Word DOC file type since version 8.0/8.5 + Service Pack when a new export format was introduced for both DOC and XLS. Pre-Update you could actually simply copy and rename the word export dll and rename it to RTF and the output would be the same.

Towards the end of 8.5 we introduced an new export file naming convention and these were the first formats to be converted. CRXF_*.dll.

RTF was more of a standard format than DOC and represented the report in a more WYSIWYG style so we dropped the DOC format and made both DOC and RTF the same output.

Our Legacy Excel file was wraught with all sorts of issues so it to was updated to the new crxf_ export dll file type.

The size increase could also be explained by UNICODE, as of CR 9 we basically doubled the output file size due to the new supported platform.

Only work around for you if you want to use a DOC file type is use Office/Word API's and save CR Export file in DOC format.

The Excel file size increase it due to unicode also and we support WorkSheets and more than 65K rows now, not sure what "Native Office encryption" means.

You'll also notice the Print file ( PRN ) has increased substantially also, once again due to unicode support.

So nothing has changed in CR .NET export file types since CR 9. If you compare them to legacy CR 8.5 then yes they have changed.

Don

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Don,

Thanks for your perfect explanation.

Now I can understand what happened, and seems that the problem was this change from Crystal Reports 8.5 to 9.

In my opinion, make no sense to have the export format options "WordForWindows", "Rich Text" and "Editable RTF" when they are generating more or less the same: a RTF file. I think that the DOC formatting should have been kept for compatibility matters.

I'm only interested in DOC format because the file size is smaller.. e.g: it's unthinkable for a web user to download 200Mb only to get a word file with ten or twenty pages.

Emilio

[former_member183750]

I have no knowledge of the details of CR exports - not regarding "native Office encryption" anyhow.

However I do know that there is no options to use "native Office encryption" in any version of CR.

This may be a good suggestion for the SAP Idea Place though.

- Ludek

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[Former Member]

Hi Ludek,

Thanks for your answer. Only to let you know, this issue comes from the latest versions of Crystal reports, because in the past it supported native Office encryption. I don't know if that was changed when SAP bought Crystal reports and delivered the following releases of that product.

Emilio