I am creating a report in Crystal XI that is grouped as follows:

Year (2000)
      Employee#      Action Date
      Employee#      Action Date

Year (2001)
      Employee#      Action Date

The employees are grouped by an action date of when they entered a job code.  When I pull the data from the system, there are multiple records that show for almost all the employees.  I only wanted to count each employee once.  My quick original solution was simply to distinctcount the employees to get the number of employees hired in each year.

I was checking my data and realized that my grand total count was one number different from the group counts and what I discovered is that one particular employee, through the course of the mutliple records pulled, has an action date in 2005 and another in 2006.  So the grouping by year is picking this person up in both years.  I only want him to show the first time (in 2005).

I need the report to allow the user to drill down within the year and see all the employees listed in that year.

Is there a way I can sort or group so that each person only shows up once...based on the first date?

Any help is GREATLY appreciated!  I am very new to Crystal, so please forgive me if this is a bad question.

Unfortunately, our IT department is less than excited about making a connection to views/queries, since this would be a published report and would be available to others to update/view at any time. 

There's not a way to do a query in Crystal, is there? Outside of the select expert itself?

Is there a way to create a formula to check for distinct employee number throughout the whole report rather than just the group the formula is in? 

Thanks again for your consideration of my questions!

another option, not the best, as excluding the dupe at time of selection (DBlank's suggestion) is by far the best (OK, maybe not the best, but what I would do as well) is to create a shared variable.