Crystal Reports Helps Companies See Through To Their Business Information

For someone experienced in business intelligence, databases or programming, Crystal Reports is relatively intuitive, though it will take time and experience to learn how to fully leverage every feature. There are included tutorials that teach the basics, but real world situations often defy the simplicity of the provided solutions. There are plenty of third-party resources from Yahoo and LinkedIn groups to user support web sites and video, instructional and printed training materials. Crystal is not something that the home user can jump into. The license is relatively expensive and does not include a database server, database or other data source. Licensing for enterprise environments can get pricey quickly. While many employers hire report developers directly, there is a large community of professional report developers who work contracts, either independently or through contract employment agencies. In most cases, the employer provides the licensed Crystal Reports tool, but if a company has only infrequent report development needs, they may expect the consultant to provide their own copy of the software. SAP is really not set up for supporting the individual, however, preferring to engage the company in business-licensed products.

Crystal Reports has incredible flexibility but their are limitations, mostly in formatting. Working with lines and boxes is not as flexible as, say, Microsoft Word. Charts and graphs have many features and options but they can be difficult to try and force your data to conform to the usage requirements. Graphics cannot be edited in-template, and some image formats are not supported (though you can easily convert an image to a supported format). The design tool can have issues with orphaned text at the bottom or the top of a page. While you can include comments in formulas, there is no ability to provide comments to the actual data, static, calculated value or other objects within the report design. Rules applied to the selection and manipulation of data can have unexpected results, leading to manual troubleshooting of report design and database queries. Like any piece of template design software, there are bound to be situations where you want to do something a certain way that is not supported by Crystal Reports, which can lead to frustration. But there are usually ways to think outside of the box to accomplish what you want.

Crystal Reports is getting a little long in the tooth. While still one of the worlds' most popular reporting tools, It hasn't received a major update in many years, while Microsoft's SQL Server Reporting Services as well as open-source and other business intelligence competition products have grown in popularity, and it shows. The user interface and feature set hasn't significantly changed in quite a while. Of course, it was already pretty rich and complete, but it lacks the feel and finish of many current generation software products. There is also no version available for the Apple Mac, which means no support for iOS devices. Some feel that SAP doesn't see the Crystal product line as the best place for its R&D investments, pushing more data analytic based products such as Web Intelligence. I think there is room and demand for both and wish SAP would wow me with an upgrade that would transform Crystal Reports into a new generation of business intelligence reporting that sets the bar for everyone else.