I have a report that was created years ago in Crystal Reports XI. Recently, I have needed to copy the report, strip out a few fields and sub-reports and save the changes as a new report. (FYI, I made these modifications in Crystal Reports 2008, so the new report is an "upgrade" of an old one.) Conceptually, this should make the new report smaller than the original but that's not the case.

When I made the modifications and saved the document, the new file was 10 times larger than the original? How can this be? By my estimation the file should have shrunk in size by 50-75%.

I've been working with CR for a while and I know that Crystal Reports can save data with your report. So, I've unchecked the option on the file menu and, subsequently, I've unchecked 'Save Data With Report' option in the Options portion of the report. Also, I've closed all of my sub-reports before saving the document. Yet my file is still large.

I've done everything I can think to do and I've even tried to browse through all of the menu options in CR and nothing looks like it can help? What else can I try to shrink the size of this report? I know that most of the data in the report is junk because when I inspect it with a hex editor, the majority of the file is an endless stream of 0xFFFFFF00's. This is useless. What can I do?