There are some helpful walk-throughs for getting started with new features in the Reviewer's Guide document on the Crystal Reports 2008 area of Business Object's website. I used this as a guide to check out some of the design features while in Visual Studio 2005. I was unable to follow the steps to use the Sort control, so went out to the standalone CR2008 app and that worked just fine. It turns out that not every one of the new designer features will be found when you use the embedded version of the designer. But you can easily use your report both in Visual Studio and in the standalone designer (where all of the design features exist) to get all of the benefits. Business Objects actually recommends using the standalone designer for doing the heavy lifting of designing the report, then using the embedded designer for testing and tweaking. Many developers who use Crystal heavily have subscribed to this method for a long time.