CR vs Excel

Just something I'd like to discuss with everyone.

We are (were) using Crystal Reports XI to design our reports from our VB.Net application. We used the Crystal Reports viewer to display the reports.

After an install of CR XI Release 2 the CR became unstable - it was trying to reinstall itself all the time etc - i did write a post about that earlier.

Anyway, long story short, I decided to scrap CR and re-do all the reports using Excel. There is a whole lot of extra coding involved and setting up of the Excel templates but at the end of the day they seem to run quicker than CR reports. Also the overall size of my project EXE and installer package is a whole lot smaller without CR.

Quite frankly i cant see a downside to using Excel over CR and i was just wondering if i missed something?

Any thoughts/comments? Has anyone else done something similar?

I made that switch a long time ago, as it made a lot of sense for the circumstances we were in.

Some downsides of using Excel:

• Excel must be installed (assuming you are using automation).
• The user can edit the file - and change what you have entered (but this can be prevented by using protection on the relevant cells etc)
• The structure of an Excel document is more structured (eg: an entire column has the same position/width).

Some good points:

• Installing your application is simpler (assuming XI is as awkward as previous versions, much simpler!).
• The user can edit the file - and add extra information (perhaps notes or graphs)
• The file can be emailed/saved/integrated with other Office documents/etc more easily.

These certainly aren't the only good/bad points, but are the ones that spring to mind.

Thanks Si

what you say makes sense. However in my current situation it seems as tho most of our reports are extracted to Excel anyway. So that is not really an issue. Over on this project anyway.

The one thing that amazes me is that the reports seem to run quicker. I think there might be an issue with the grouping in CR. The path i followed was to use a datareader (vb.net) and get my Main Group. loop thru this and inside the loop use the group variables in my where clause. An so on and so on as i drill down into the data. Now that to me is a lot more Database access than before. And yet it seems quicker.

Another really nice feature is setting up the Excel template with the excel cell formulas and this is just way easier than doing it in CR.

From my limited time doing it this way it does seem to be a bit improvement over the CR way of doing things.