Is Crystal Reports for us? (1 Viewer)

Hi. Our company is using a rather complex data system, proprietary software.
Understandably mgt. and administrators wish to stop relying on a handful of IT-types to run ad hoc queries.
The choices are learning SQL or Crystal Reports. Trng would likely be over days as opposed to long courses of daily for weeks or months.
For non-techies would either be practical, given the trng and previous query/ database design experience of the staff (very little, for many).

Thoughts?

Russ

I cannot speak much about using any report writer other than Crystal Reports (I have been using it for years). But I do know a little about MS-SQL report writer. First off it will require you to know how to write TSQL statements. From what little I have done with it, it does not seem as easy to design as Crystal Reports (CR).

Most of the training I have seen for CR is from three to five days of classroom instruction. For most people, this will give them a good foundation to create simple reports (I have been using CR for close to 10 years and am still learning things about it). CR strength is it's ability to access data from a variety of data sources. You will need some knowledge about tables and fields and how to properly connect tables (especially for your particular database). CR is expensive and there are limitations. The good and the bad, CR is produced by SAP, a very large company in Europe. They have very good technical support if you can navigate through their websites and figure out how to send a 'message'. I would suggest talking to a SAP representative before purchasing CR to make sure it will do all that you hope it will. If you plan to have staff dynamically run the reports getting live data, you probably would need to purchase the Business Objects Enterprise ($$$$).

Another good thing, is that CR is being used all over the world and there are several forums (including this one) that you can get answers to how to do a particular task in CR.

I hope this help.s

The Stonefield Query product sounds interesting. I may have to do some research on it.

If one is willing to spend the big bucks for BO Enterprise. I have been learing a little bit about what they call Universes (say views). If one has the time to create Universes for the end-users, it will make creating reports much easier.

I hope this helps.