I have a customer who really wants to keep a very long naming convention during a migration to a new database. The new database uses Crystal Reports for reporting. I have gotten an ok to shorten the naming convention somewhat to "shortened name-date" with all of the other pertinent information parsed out into new fields.
However, one of the users who does a lot of the reporting has now said that one of the most tedious parts of her job was parsing out the old names so she could have a simple, high level, parent name for executive reports. With the new naming convention, she will still need to parse the field to get just the shortened name as her executive-level parent name. If I can't manage to get the ok to drop the date from this field, can Crystal reports be used to parse the field at the "-" similar to parsing the data using Excel? What I'm looking for is that her reports would have a formula that generates the executive-level short name behind the scenes so she doesn't have to think about it.
The date already exists in a date field, so parsing out the date from the name would not change other report functionality. Ideally, I would want to enter the data already separated out and concatenate fields per each user's particular needs, but I may not be able to do. Any info would be much appreciated.
Thank you.
