SAP Knowledge Base Article - Public

1310166 - Formatting lost when exporting a report to MS Word Editable from Crystal Reports

Symptom

  • Formatting is different.
  • Background color, text alignments and other formatting not retained when exporting the report.
  • Formatting, Box, Lines, ... are lost, when exporting a report from Crystal Reports to Microsoft Word Editable format.

Environment

  • SAP Crystal Reports 2013
  • SAP Crystal Reports 2016
  • SAP Crystal Reports 2020
           
  • SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise 4.1
  • SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise 4.2
  • SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise 4.3

Reproducing the Issue

  1. In Crystal Reports, or Crystal Reports for Enterprise, create a report off any data source.
  2. Add a Text Box with some text to it.
  3. Format the Text Box background color, line spacing, etc.
  4. Add a Line object to the report.
  5. Export the report to Microsoft Word Editable.
           
    Notice the Text Box background color, and lines are missing in the MS Word document.

Cause

  • When exporting a report to Microsoft Word - Editable format, the formatting is different because it has to converts all of the report object contents to text lines and doesn't use text frames, therefore:
            
    • Text formatting is retained, but attributes such as background color, fill pattern, and so on will not be retained.
            
    • Images in the report are inlined with the textual content and, therefore, the images automatically shift to accommodate text when the document is edited in Microsoft Word.  
              
    • Lines and Box objects are not exported, because they are objects that can span over multiple sections, and cannot be conversted to appear on a text line.
                
  • Note: The Microsoft Word - Editable (RTF) format has an option to insert page breaks at the end of each report page. This option may not correspond to the page breaks created by Microsoft Word; the option is used mainly to separate the report-page contents.

Resolution

  • Export the report to a different format that supports object formatting like:
    • PDF
    • MS Word
         
  • For information on the supported functionalities by exporting format, see the SAP Knowledge Base Article: 1946358

Keywords

alignment, justify, left, right, CR, box, lines, background colors , KBA , BI-RA-CR , Crystal Reports designer or Business View Manager , BI-RA-CRE , Crystal Reports for Enterprise , Problem

Product

SAP Crystal Reports 2013 ; SAP Crystal Reports 2016 ; SAP Crystal Reports 2020