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Winston Churchill
Institute of IT Trainers - Freelance Trainer of the Year 2006 & 2009
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  Maximum Impact Solutions Limited - Reporting Solutions, Creating Answers
Reporting Solutions - Creating Answers, Crystal Reports, Dashboarding (Xcelsius) & SQL Reporting Services

Crystal Reports, Xcelsius (Dashboarding) and SQL Reporting Services Blog

Welcome to our blog of scribbles and musings designed to share with YOU our insights, knowledge and experience from training, designing and writing reports using Crystal Reports, SQL Server Reporting Services and Crystal Dashboarding (Xcelsius) for our customers.

Please contact us with any questions, queries and/or issues that may have arisen from your use of Crystal Reports, SQL Reporting Services and/or Crystal Xcelsius in response to out blog posts.

We love nothing better to be challenged by something that makes others scratch their heads Feed ME!!!!

13
January

How do I extract characters before a specific character in a string field using SQL

Working with a new client, they wanted to extract a company name from a field that had extra characters.

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10
December

How Do I return the 4 weeks data starting from the Previous Friday date in SQL?

Working with a new client, one of their reports needs to return data from the previous 4 weeks from the last Friday

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04
December

How Do I Find Missing Correlating Data?

I had a client contact me asking how they could find the sales agents who had not made any sales

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14
November

How Do I Generate an SQL Server Reporting Services Report List

I was recently started a SQL Reporting Services writing project, and the first thing I needed to do was to carry out an audit of their current reports.

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11
November

How Do I Show the 3 Largest Sales Figures per Group on One Row in SQL Server Reporting Service 2008 R2

During a recent SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 R2 consultancy, the delegate wanted to know how to display the 3 highest values per group as a single record.

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13
May

How Can I Get All the Dates between 2 Parameter Dates

During an SQL Server Reporting Services consultancy, the client needed to see the performance of the sales team over a period of time

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11
January

How Do I Create a Sentence Case Text Field in SQL?

During a recent SQL server reporting writing project, the client wanted to display a text field that has various cases for the two values stored within, and wanted it standardised to sentence case.

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21
November

How Do I Add A Null to the Where Clause In list in SQL?

During a recent SQL training course one of the delegates asked "How Do I add Nulls to the In list of values in the SQL Where Clause"?

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13
October

How Do I write a percentage formula in SQL

During a recent training session, a number of delegates asked how do they write a percentage formula, that does not result in 0.

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14
September

How Do I Calculate the Last Friday of the Previous Month using SQL

During a recent SQL Server Reporting Services report writing project I needed to write some SQL to calculate the last Friday of the previous month for report parameters

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28
July

How Do I Calculate the 1st Monday of the Previous Month using SQL

During a recent SQL Server Reporting Services report writing project I needed to write some SQL to calculate the 1st Monday of the previous month for report parameters

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11
June

How Do I Calculate the Top N Sales by Group using SQL?

During a recent SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 R2 consultancy the client wanted to know how to return the Top N Sales by Group

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13
May

How Do I Add a Date Feild to a Time Field in SQL?

During a recent SQL server reporting service report writing project, I had to write a number of reports where the date time of a transaction was stored in two separate date and time fields.

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13
March

How Do I Calculate the Day Name from a Date Field in SQL?

During a recent SQL training session one of the delegates asked "How Do I calculate the day of the week that an order was placed?"

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13
December

How Do I Find Out the version of SQL Server Service Packs have been Installed

A common question that I have to ask my clients, is "What version of SQL Server Service are you working on and what Service Packs have been installed?"

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05
November

How Do I find the Primary and Foreign Key fields in an SQL Database?

During a recent Crystal Reports 2011 consultancy, I was working with a bespoke SQL based database, without any information about the structure, the tables, fields or the links.

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13
May

How Do I Sort by Financial Year?

During a recent SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 report writing project, my client wanted the budget vs actuals charts and matrix months sorted by financial year instead of calendar year.

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12
February

How Do I Split the Date and Time from a DateTime field using SQL

During a recent SQL Server Reporting Services report writing project the client needed to separate the Date and Time from a DateTime field

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13
January

How Do I Deal with Null Values in Address Formula Fields in SQL?

During a recent training session on of the delegates asked "How do I stop Null addresses, if one of the address fields is Null in the formula"?

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19
March

How Do I Extract all the Characters before a Specific Character in a String Field?

During a recent Crystal Reports XI report design project two tables needed to be linked together, where in one table the field only contained the user name, in the second table the field contained the user email address, which consisted of the user name, plus the organisational domain.

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07
March

How Do I Extract Characters from within a String Field in SQL Reporting Services 2008?

During a recent SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 report design project, one of my clients needed to extract some text after the last instance of a specific character of a string field.

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12
December

How Do I Create an Index for a Dynamic Parameter in Crystal Reports 2008?

Recently a client had an issue with creating a dynamic parameter based on the Customer Name field returning over 3000 values, and the filtering feature only worked if one was in the correct page.

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07
August

How Do I Return All the Values of a Group on a Single Line in SQL Reporting Services 2008?

During a recent SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 project I was asked "How Do I Return All the Values of a Group on a Single Line, separated with a vertical line using SQL?

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10
April

How Do I Concatenate the Year to a Custom Financial Year Start Date in SQL Reporting Services

During a current report design consultancy using SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 I was asked how do I concatenate the year to a custom financial year start date?

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30
March

How Do I Find the Position of a Specific Character in a String Field using SQL?

I was recently asked during a SQL Reporting Services training session, how does one find a position of a specified character in a string field.

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16
November

How Do I Concatenate Fields with Null Values in SQL Reporting Services?

During a recent training session a delegate asked how do I concatenate fields that contain null values correctly.

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29
September

How Do I Combine Records from Two Separate Tables in Crystal Reports?

I was recently asked by a client how do I combine records from two separate tables to make a single dataset in Crystal Reports?

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03
February

How Do I List All the Descriptions of Tables, Views and Fields of a SQL Database?

Recently while working with a client when they asked, How does one list all the tables and views, with their fields and descriptions of a SQL database?

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03
August

How Do I Find All the Products that Have Not Generated Sales?

A client recently asked me How do I create an SQL statement that lists all the products that have not generated any sales, that can be used with either Crystal Reports or SQL Server Reporting Services?

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15
July

How Do I List All the Views in an SQL Database?

Recently while working with a client they asked, how does one list all the views within an SQL database that contains a specific field name?

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07
July

How Do I Change the format of a DateTime field in SQL?

A client has just asked me how does one format a datetime field in SQL to display the date in the format dd/mm/yyyy?

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