Great for highly formatted reporting, but not the most fun to work with
Updated January 09, 2018
Great for highly formatted reporting, but not the most fun to work with
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SAP Crystal
We build Crystal Reports that are used in a third party software to extract data via the GUI from our SQL database. The reports themselves are being managed by one department (me) but are accessed by the whole business. We use Crystal Reports to generate client forms.
- Easy formatting, drag and drop.
- Relatively similar GUI to Word, very developed GUI.
- Well-documented, easy to Google.
- Not intuitive - steep learning curve.
- Need to be able to have a sub-report within a sub-report. This is a major missing piece.
- Need to be able to copy sub-reports and paste.
I have to use Crystal Reports with our third party software, and it does make the pretty formatting easy, but it's actually less intuitive than the software with less of a GUI.
SAP Crystal Feature Ratings
Using SAP Crystal
1 - We use Crystal Reports to create client-facing reports of our data - individualized action item reports etc.
1 - Basic knowledge of the software functions/formatting and how to connect to data
- Additional formatted reports
- Compliance Report
- Inputs Report
- Audit Report
- We tried to use it to create xmls for data exchange but the built-in formatting made it not useful
Evaluating SAP Crystal and Competitors
- Product Features
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Existing Relationship with the Vendor
It is what is used by our database software, built by another vendor. We had no choice.
I would use a more variable reporting software, probably SSRS or even a data visualization tool like Looker or Tableau
SAP Crystal Implementation
- Vendor implemented
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled
- User adoption
- Runtime engine hard to install
- Installation is not intuitive (have to search for setup file)
SAP Crystal Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
None | Slow Resolution Poor followup Problems left unsolved Not kept informed Escalation required Difficult to get immediate help Need to explain problems multiple times Support doesn't seem to care Slow Initial Response |
Yes - Still has not been resolved, reported over a year ago
They were extremely helpful in helping me transfer my license to another machine, but I had to contact them by email - online support took me a million different places and wasn't helpful
Using SAP Crystal
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use | Unnecessarily complex Difficult to use Not well integrated Slow to learn Cumbersome Lots to learn |
- The Formatting box that is set out just like Word is great, very intuitive.
- Formula editor is very easily set up with examples and operators easily found.
- Page settings give more options than I could ever even desire, so many wonderful choices!
- Basically you have to Google how to do anything, even just how to connect to a data source, the wizard is crap.
- Sub-reports need to be highly used, and therefore should be more accessible (copy paste, format within the report).
- Changing from portrait to landscape is sooooo tedious and painful, you need to manually extend every field and every field within every sub-report and vice versa, it would be easier doing it physically on paper - it's that bad.