This is a problem with the way Crystal exports data that you may or may not be able to do anything about.
There are some tricks to getting things to export to Excel cleanly:
1. Make sure that column headers are all the same number of lines - you can't have headers that are one line and others that are two lines unless all of the two-line headers are grouped together on the left.
2. Left-align the headers.
3. Within columns, left-align the header and data objects and make them the same width.
4. Use the Excel Data Only export. This will give you a cleaner export that doesn't have merged columns and rows. The non-Data Only export is more for "picture perfect" export, it makes it VERY difficult to "slice-and-dice" data.
Another trick that I have used when some columns may be empty is to use a text object with just a '-' in it. I align it with the column data and make it the same size, send it to the back, and make the font white to match the background. I set a suppress formula on it for "not IsNull(<data field in the column>)". What this does is put a dash in the column if there's no data. Because the font is white, you can't see it on the report. However, when you do a data-only export, it does show up in the column as a place-holder.
-Dell