Re: What's the deal with Crystal Reports?

Admittedly, I am not using the latest version of Crystal Reports, but I
have been using versions 7 and 8 for about five years now and these are the
gripes I have

I find the product to be incredibly buggy. There is an inconsistency
with its actions, and a lot of thought is not placed into the workflow of a
report.

For example, say I have five disparate elements with a shared property
that I want to change. If I select the five elements and then change one
property, it actually changes all of the shared properties of the five
elements to, well, something inconsistent, not just the property I changed.

This requires me to go and change every element individually. If I have
to change more than a handful of elements, it starts to consume a huge
amount of time.

Other gripes include (but are not limited to):

- Only one level of sub reporting available.
- No options on exported reports (to PDF, Word, HTML, etc, etc).
- VERY slow with relational data. It's generally MUCH faster when
everything is in a flat table structure.
- No ability to have compounded calculations across groups.

Like I said, this is just for versions 7 and 8, and while some of these
things might have been addressed, it just never felt like a stable product
to me. So much so that when new development takes place, I am going to look
at Telerik and Active Reports first, and Crystal Reports only if there is
absolutely nothing else available that suits our needs.

--
- Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]
- mvp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


"Bob Johnson" <A@xxxxx> wrote in message
news:uKiNzXz0HHA.4476@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In this NG late last week someone asked about reporting in .NET. I
suggested going with ActiveReports and to avoid Crystal Reports. A bunch
of you piled on and not only concurred that Crystal sucks - but went
beyond that.

So my new question:
Do any of you actually use *and* like Crystal Reports? If so, why
specifically do you like it?
For those of you who hate it; why - specifically - does Crystal Reports
have such a problem with you folks?

Personally, I started avoiding it about 8 years ago when I was shopping
for a good report writer. At that time, Crystal had a proprietary
scripting language that I didn't want to learn, plus it was way more
expensive. Additionally I couldn't bind to arrays or other arbitrary
in-memory structures.

I haven't bothered to look at Crystal since then - beyond cruising past
their booth at conventions and seeing that they are now touting all this
"enterprise" crap related to reports. Plus their Web site is horrible -
trying to figure out what you get - specifically as a developer - is
nearly impossible.

What are some of your specific reasons for liking or disliking the
product? I want to know if I'm missing something - or even if the product
might deserve a second look.

Thanks.



.

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