upgrade to Crystal Reports 8.5?

[mrpauly]

Hey Folks,

What are the advantages for upgrading from 8.0 to 8.5 and is it worth it? If you are a current user of 8.5, please give me your opinion.

Paul

 

[IdoMillet]

You may want to look at:

http://www.hammerman.com/crystal85released.html

Cheers,
- Ido

 

[MalcolmW]

V8.5 has some new functions over V8.0. The Math, Financial, and Type Conversion were mostly available previously through UFLs. Making them part of the product functionality improves performance, and allows them to be evaluated earlier (UFLs are only evaluated WhilePrintingRecords).
I have found some of the Programming shortcut functions, Date and Time functions, and Array and String functions to be very useful. Some are just renamed/slightly modified versions of functions that previously existed.
Overall, I find V8.5 more stable than V8.0, although the product still places more importance on the feature list than on reliability.
Math functions:
Atn, Cos, Exp, Int, Log, Pi, Rnd, Sin, Sgn, Sqr, Tan
Financial functions:
DDB, FV, IPmt, IRR, MIRR, NPer, NPV, Pmt, PPmt, PV, Rate, SLN, SYD
Programming shortcut functions:
Choose, IFF, Switch
Type conversion functions:
CBool, CCur, CDbl, CStr, CDate, CTime, CDateTime
Date and time functions:
DateValue, TimeValue, DateTimeValue, IsDate, IsTime, IsDateTime, MonthName, WeekdayName, DateAdd, DateDiff, DatePart, DateSerial, Timer, TimeSerial
Array and string functions:
Filter, Replace, Join, Split, UBound, InStrRev, StrReverse
Malcolm Wynden
Authorized Crystal Engineer

http://www.wynden.net

malcolm@wynden.net