65,535 row limitations on cross-tab report

I am using "Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 13.0.20" together with Visual Studio 2015. I have a cross-tab report created by Crystal Reports and developed a simple C# program (with Crystal Report for Visual Studio) to open and export it as PDF file. Occasionally, the Crystal Report library would return an error message of "The number of rows or columns is too big. Try limiting the number of unique group values. Details: The number of rows or columns exceed its limit, 65535."

Curiously, I modified the program to retrieve data directly by the same query in the report. Turnout the query only returns around 18,000 rows of data. I'm a bit puzzled on how many rows of data the cross-tab report can actually handle such that I can at least place a limitation of date range in the report?

2018-07-23 17:37:15,133 [INFO ] [btnExportReport_Click] [69] CrystalReportTestDrive.MainForm 
 - Report generation begin
2018-07-23 17:37:17,068 [DEBUG] [btnExportReport_Click] [114] CrystalReportTestDrive.MainForm 
 - Date Received: 2018/04/04 - 2018/06/01
2018-07-23 17:37:17,068 [DEBUG] [btnExportReport_Click] [115] CrystalReportTestDrive.MainForm 
 - Service Group: Special Investigation
2018-07-23 17:37:17,068 [DEBUG] [btnExportReport_Click] [115] CrystalReportTestDrive.MainForm 
 - No. of rows: 18427
2018-07-23 17:37:21,896 [ERROR] [btnExportReport_Click] [143] CrystalReportTestDrive.MainForm 
 - 報表應用程式伺服器失敗
   at CrystalDecisions.ReportAppServer.ConvertDotNetToErom.ThrowDotNetException(Exception e)
   at CrystalDecisions.ReportSource.EromReportSourceBase.ExportToStream(ExportRequestContext reqContext)
   at CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.FormatEngine.ExportToStream(ExportRequestContext reqContext)
   at CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.FormatEngine.Export(ExportRequestContext reqContext)
   at CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.ReportDocument.ExportToDisk(ExportFormatType formatType, String fileName)
   at CrystalReportTestDrive.MainForm.btnExportReport_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e) in \\vmware-host\Shared Folders\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects\CrystalReportTestDrive\CrystalReportTestDrive\MainForm.cs:line 128
2018-07-23 17:37:21,897 [INFO ] [btnExportReport_Click] [147] CrystalReportTestDrive.MainForm 
 - Report generation failed

Thanks.