Date Axis Stacked Area Charts

[Former Member]

Hi,

I'm just evaluating the full version of Crystal Reports 2008 having had some frustrations with the design restrictions in the basic version that ships with Visual Studio 2008. Particularly important to me is the design features for charting data. A lot of the charts I need to build have daily data points and the dates for these data points are represented as labels on the X axis. My problem has been that when you try and build a report with several months or more worth of data points the X axis is getting way too crowded even to the extent of being unreadable with overlapping labels. I've noticed in the full version that there is a date axis chart type whereby you can alter the scale of the X axis e.g. to only show a date at a frequency once per month or greater resulting in the X axis being readable. This seems to work great for line charts etc, however one of the charts I need is a stacked area chart and unfortunately I can find no options / chart types that allow me to scale the dates on the X axis. I've seen there is a date axis chart for area charts, but there is no option of having this chart type as stacked. I know you can also skip data labels in X axis group options, but the max I can skip is 2 and so that doesn't really help me either.

Is there any way of achieving a stacked area chart with a scaled date axis in Crystal Reports 2008? If not it seems to me that the lack of this feature is a real omission from the product. Even Excel charts can handle this type of chart and I would imagine Crystal Reports charts should be more advanced in its charting capabilities.

Any help or recommendations would be appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Mark

[former_member11696]

Hi Guys, Our charting dll is a third party resource from 3D Graphics. As noted there are limitations as to what CR's version the dll can do. If you go to 3D graphics site you will find more info.

Thank you

Don

[Former Member]

I have run in to the same problem. I work for a systems integration company and I purchased this software because I have a lot of crystal reports and .NET experience but I have very minimal crystal chart experience. I need to use the charting to display data over time collections. I need to show all data points collected but for some series that I deal with I need to be able to scale the x-axis labels to something that is legible. There is an aftermarket package(CRReports3.5) for $500 more dollars that would enable me to control this but it seems like alot more money for a small piece of functionality that should already be built in. I have Crystal Reports 2008 and am working with visual studio 2008 can someone please tell me is there ANY WAY to achieve this functionality without purchasing additional software? Otherwise this software purchase was worthless for my current project.

Regards

Dave Bedo

[Former Member]

Actually, I have just noticed that if you preview your chart and in preview mode change the frequency of group labels to skip that you can enter any number you like, whereas if you try to do the same in design view you are restricted to a maximum of 2.

So possibly a small bug there unless there is somewhere in the options that you can configure this kind of constraint.

Even though the above helps matters, I'd still prefer a scaled date axis for a stacked area chart. It would be a much neater solution. So if anybody has any comments on that it would be appreciated.

Regards,

Mark