Crystal Reports - As useful as your builder is knowledgable
March 29, 2017
Crystal Reports - As useful as your builder is knowledgable
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SAP Crystal Reports
We use Crystal Reports with Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge; I am the only user, and it is currently only used in the Institutional Advancement office. RE's canned reports are rather limited, and even NXT's analytics are view-only, so the only way to slice and dice our data is outside of the database using Crystal Reports. I've built Solicitor reports showing various information on their assignees, participation reports for various constituencies, financial overviews, and solicitor performance reports. We basically use Crystal Report for almost all of our fundraising reporting needs.
- Crystal Reports is really only limited by the creativity and knowledge of the report builder.
- It's versatile, and can work with any database or data set that can export into Access or something similar.
- It's a great way to get people to generate their own reports. Sure they can be intense to build, but once that's done, anyone can use them.
- It's not something you can just pick up and start using, you'll need someone who knows what they're doing to build your reports.
- I wish it were possible to use formulas in parameters.
- I also wish there were a way to automatically link all tables at once, instead of having to set the join for each table individually. This can get quite tedious when you're working with a lot of tables.