Crystal Reports 8.5 and Excel

[tmozer]

I was trying to use CR 8.5 to do some reports using data in a couple Excel spreadsheets in use in our shop and could not seem to find a way to use them directly. Got around this by converting the Excel files to Access files, but I was supprised that I could not just use the .XLS files directly.

Am I missing something, or is it true that CR 8.5 will not load Excel files?

 

[synapsevampire]

You can use them.

Set up an Excel ODBC connection.

In general Excel files are problematic, so link (not import) them into access, then create a query off of them as the data source for Crystal.

If they update the Excel files, they'll be updated in Access.

-k

 

[tmozer]

This is what I get trying to connect to any Excel file:

ODBC
Excel Files
no items found

Am I doing something wrong? Maybe something needed did not get installed when I installed CR??