Not many people are aware of this "feature," and documentation is hard to come by. What makes it so insidious is that there is no practical way to know what that count is. When 255 is reached, the revised report design simply can no longer be saved -- without any error message to explain why.



This is particularly frustrating if you've made a lot of changes to the report design. You can't simply save it with a different name because the original may have already been saved under many names over the years. Your only choice is to start a fresh new report and painstakingly cut and paste into it. Not much fun if you were planning to do something else.

When I first because aware of the problem five or more years ago, someone in our IT department found documentation on this quirk, but I can't lay my hands (or computer) on it now. I have to assume that, somewhere in the file header, there's an incrementing byte and thus a 255 limit.