Should I Buy Crystal Reports?

[dcarlson]

I was wondering if my company should buy the full version of crystal reports (considering I have never used it) or if I should go with some other reporting software package.

I'm currently using the downloadable Report Design Component of Crystal Reports and there seems to be a lot of bugs in it.

I would appreciate any advice given.

Thanks,

[Buzby]

I use Crystal Reports 7 on a day to day basis. Although previous version of Crystal were a bit crap to say the least they seem to have fixed the majority of problems with Version 7. I can't speak for Version 8 (the latest one) but I haven't used the Report Designer Component because it's a bit pants.
However, the standalone report writer is pretty damn good - and (so I'm told) much better than any other report writer on the market. It's also easy to print the reports via VB if you need to - all you do is drop the .OCX on the form and then do;

CrystalReport1.ReportFilename=........
CrystalReport1.SelectionFormulae=... [sql query] - optional
CrystalReport1.PrintReport

(of course you can do a lot more with it but this is just a simple example).

So I would say "yes" - it's worth buying - it's not that expensive anyway. The worst drawback to it is the distribution of your reports with your VB program - you have to distribute about 4MB of files to allow a SQL SERVER report to work (for example)

[dcarlson]

I really appreciate the advice.

Thanks.

I've used Crystal Reports since 5.0 for various reporting needs.

I can't say it has been the easiest to use through the various versions but I believe it is a very powerful reporting tool that I have yet to tap into every corner of its vast functionality.

One concern I've had since I started using Crystal 6 in VB is the lack of documentation. If you go up to Amazon.com or any of the bookstores you will not find that many resources for Crystal.

My bottom line opinion is it is a powerful tool for reporting. If your reports are simple, I would look at Active Reports or use the built in Data Reports that comes with VB. If you reporting needs are more complex, Crystal is the tool for you.

I am now using Crystal 8 and find many improvements over 7, especially in the relm of connecting to any backend databases.

If you are using 6 or 7 currently and passing in a recordset via VB, be aware that 8 passes in the recordset ByRef instead of ByVal. I was cleaning up after I passed the recordset to my report before I allowed the user to preview and when I switched to 8, the report was blank because I closed the recordset and set it to nothing at the end of the function.

I could type all day about my experiences about Crystal so I'll stop for now. If you have any specific questions you can email me or post up here and I'll do my best to answer any questions.

Brian Mowbray

[dcarlson]

The data report designer is to simple some of my reports have a few subreports I see a lot of different type of reports that need to generated so I think I will go with Crystal.

Thanks for the advice.

I just recently developed an application which takes data from Compuware Corporation's EcoTools and generates HTML based reports showing line charts. I used VB6 and CR8.

The requirements would result in about 2500 + reports. Rather than write that many reports, I created a single report and then passed the data sets via code. I also created a second report which showed mulitple line charts for comparison of data sets.

I haven't yet played with the RDO but that's my next step. I envision an application that runs directly from the network to pull the data and report. This would provide the network geeks with a line chart report that would be continuously updating, sort of like a stock ticker.