Hi Vannorman,

The old Crystal Report components that enable the printing and viewing of Crystal Report forms and reports will be removed.  Those components are from an obsolete version of Crystal Reports (8.5) that hasn’t been supported by Sage for more than 10 years and, that Sage can no longer legally provide to customers.

For options other than Sage 50 form designer, please take a look at the following KB article.

What are my options if I need additional functionality not available in Sage 50 forms? - KB32636

Hi Keith,

I took a look at the article KB32636 and have a question: I have Sage 50 2013.4 and I am wondering if it's possible to upgrade to Sage 50 2014.3? I can't quite tell from looking around Sage's website if this is a possible upgrade and I'd like to check out the feature that allows one to export reports and forms to .csv files (as outlined in the article KB32636.)

Thanks,

Kristine

It may have been unclear in the article, the 2014.3 update hasn't been widely released yet.  There may be a beta version available to Certified Consultants.

The 2014.3 release doesn't add functionality, it removes it.  Basically it's supposed to work the same as prior versions, including the one you have, up to generating the CSV files.  

If you want to test how the new release will work, without killing a lot of trees, select a Crystal Report form and print it to a PDF or to a printer that's shut off, then delete the print job, and work from the CSV files that are created.

The new release will stop after generating the CSV files, where the current versions call a DLL that runs the Crystal Report that reads the CSV files.  

So, after the update is installed, if you have a current, licensed version of Crystal Reports, you will have to print to CSV, then throw Crystal Reports into gear and get it to print each invoice, one at a time.  Probably batch printing of Crystal Reports invoices will have to be done with a custom program.

for an invoice, it looks like a handful of CSV files are created in Documents\Simply Accounting\forms\CAN2014

Randy

to maintain a seemless interface, do you know if Sage is planning on replacing the DLL with the ability specify a batch file to run ?

so that I can specify invoice.bat to run when printing invoices

and invoice.bat starts up crystal reports, msaccess, etc

for an invoice, it looks like a handful of CSV files are created in Documents\Simply Accounting\forms\CAN2014

Randy

to maintain a seemless interface, do you know if Sage is planning on replacing the DLL with the ability specify a batch file to run ?

so that I can specify invoice.bat to run when printing invoices

and invoice.bat starts up crystal reports, msaccess, etc

Re to maintain a seemless interface, do you know if Sage is planning on replacing the DLL with the ability specify a batch file to run ?

The trick is, is to capture what happens between hitting the print button and the actual printing. Sage doesn't seem to want to let a user access that, either.

That was my suggestion, too - add a configurable parameter so that a batch, a script, an EXE, or SOMETHING could be run automatically.

I only know what they explained in the tech document, if they had intentions of keeping the process of printing customized third party forms to be automatic, it could have been done by providing some sort of configurable command line. 

I would imagine that more or less all the current printing to a Crystal Reports form does, is to call the printing DLL and pass it the filename of the report form to run, and the location of the CSV files.