If you are using Crystal Reports version 8.5 and Microsoft Excel 2003 with Service Pack 3, you have probably seen the message “File error: data has been lost” when opening an Excel file created by the Crystal 8.5 export. Usually, I have not noticed any actual data loss, but yesterday I did. The problem seems to become acute when there are multiple subreports on a line in the Crystal report.

The solution is to open the spreadsheet in Calc from the OpenOffice suite, available for free from OpenOffice.org. The spreadsheet that had problems in Excel opened flawlessly in Calc.

Sage Mas90/200 has some nice lookup features accessed by the magnifying-glass to the right of fields like items, customers, vendors, invoices, etc. If a file gets very large, (like invoice history), you click the magnifying-glass and the system freezes while it loads a huge number of records into the viewer. You have to wait. Nuisance! Aggravating! Especially if you had planned to do a selective search anyway, like all invoices for a customer or vendor, or all customers with “United” in the name. While you are reading this, your system is still looking-up all those records while-you-wait. If your MAS version is at least 4.10, you can remedy this by asking your MAS90/200 administrator to go to User Maintenance and change your User Preferences field for Lookup Limit for Initial Display to a non-zero number. This figure applies to all lookups in all modules for Mas90/200 for you only. I’d recommend the number be at least 1000, but no more that 3000 since the system handles that number of records fairly quickly, and will load all of the records for smaller files (like vendors or customers) completely. For those huge files like invoice history, the system will immediately tell you Lookup Limit Exceeded, then allow you to immediately choose the search settings you were going to enter anyway. The advantage is that you don’t have to wait while those long, long, lookups are loading. Call Friendly Systems support if we can help. 689-273-4010 ext 2