Crystal Reports make reporting crystal clear.
November 16, 2013

Crystal Reports make reporting crystal clear.

Shannon Odland | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

2008

Overall Satisfaction

  • Formatting - My sales team is very familiar with a particular format and I was able to recreate old reports identical to what they were used to. The transition from one computer system to another was seamless.
  • Linking information - In our computer system there is a specific set of data tables for different departments such as accounting, sales and manufacturing. The sales information does not easily link to the accounting information, but Crystal Reports allows me to pull information from both sides into one report
  • Grouping Information - I love grouping data in order to better analyze information. Rather than having to sort and subtotal like you do in Excel, Crystal allows me to write one report and pre-determine the groups so I save time not having to massage the data into the correct groups before I do my analysis
  • Cross Tabs - Cross tabs are so easy with the Cross Tab expert!! I can't begin to explain how nice it is to just select the fields I want in each position and then select the function I need and it does the work for me.
  • Terminology - Some of the terminology in the errors are very technically oriented to the point where I have to search the web in order to figure out what it means. I'm not an expert by any means, but I run some complex reports and when there is an error that I cannot resolve it takes a lot of time to figure out what the issue is.
  • Employee Empowerment - Now that our Crystal Reports are written and published, all of our team members have access to run the same reports across the company. Previously, there was only 1 point person in charge of running reports, which took a lot of time away from other job duties.
  • Increased Employee Efficiency - One of the Crystal Reports my company uses has allowed me to take a task that took 3 days to complete and cut the time down to 4 hours. There was a lot of manual data collection and calculations that were done, which has also led to less errors.
  • Accurate real-time data - Since Crystal Reports are very quick to run, we are able to give real time data to our customers rather than maintaining oudated databases in other systems such as Excel.
Without the use of Crystal Reports my company would not have many of the reports we need to do business on a day to day basis. Our computer system gives us the basic reports, but anything more detailed requires an outside program such as Crystal to give us the data we need. Crystal is great in that it simplifies the process of pulling a SQF query out of our system.
One of the key questions that I would ask are: How many reports do you need to run and how complex are they? If it's only a handful, the benefit may not outweigh the cost. If they are looking to run a variety of reports that are overly complex, then I would give a rousing "yes" and suggest they purchase Crystal. If the reports are rather basic, it may not be worth the time and money to purchase an outside system and training costs involved with Crystal Reports.

Product Usage

5 - Sales & Customer Service