SAP Knowledge Base Article - Public

2928736 - Why exporting a report from Crystal Reports to different formats, takes different amount of time?

Symptom

  • Performance difference when exporting to different format.
  • Exporting a report to some format, takes more time than exporting to other format.
  • In Crystal Reports, when exporting a report to format like: MS Excel (97-2003), MS World, ... it takes more time than when exporting to other format like: CSV, Text, ...
  • Why does it take more time to export a report from Crystal Reports to some format than other? 

Environment

  • SAP Crystal Reports 2013
  • SAP Crystal Reports 2016 
  • SAP Crystal Reports 2020

Reproducing the Issue

  1. In Crystal Reports, open a report.
  2. Export a report to a format, like: MS Excel (97-2003)
  3. Take note of how long it takes to export the report.
  4. Export the report to another format like: CSV, or Text.
  5. Take note of how long it takes to export the report.
      
    Notice it takes longer time to export the same report to one format, than another. Why?

Resolution

  • In brief: it takes more time to export to some format than others because each exporting format are really different, and supports different functionalities, therefore more functionalities it supports, more time it takes to export the report.  For a list of supported functionalities by exporting format, see the SAP Knowledge Base Article 1946358 
                  
  • In more details:
         
    • There are two types of exporting format in Crystal Reports:
      • Record based;
      • Page based  
             
    • Record based format
      • Export data with no formatting, or very limitted formatting, and therefore those simpler format export faster.
      • Record based formats are: Text, CSV, Microsoft Excel Workbook Data-only (xlsx), XML, ODBC, etc...
             
    • Page base format
      • Export the formatting of the report, as much as possible, and it is therefore much more complex to export a report to those formats, by consequent, it takes more time to export the report. For a list of supported functionalities by exporting format, see the SAP Knowledge Base Article 1946358 
      • Page base formats are: Microsoft Excel (97-2003) (xls), Microsoft Word (97-2003), Rich Text Format (RTF), PDF, etc...
              
    • Also, generating the format of destination could be much more complex for some format than other. 
      For example: Generating a simple text file is simpler than generating a PDF document. 

Keywords

CR, XPORT , KBA , BI-RA-CR , Crystal Reports designer or Business View Manager , Problem

Product

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