Crystal Reports - A Premium Flexible Report Development Tool
April 18, 2017
Crystal Reports - A Premium Flexible Report Development Tool
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SAP Crystal Reports
I currently use Crystal Reports to develop many ad-hoc reports for executive management analytical and reporting purposes with the administration and finance department. I also use it to develop customized transactional data and trial balance reports that are specifically tailored for the data I want to see and the manner in which I want to see it (customized grouping) which isn't as easily provided for from the accounting system we use.
- Provides the flexibility to choose the data you want to include from any table in your database and better enables you to understand the structure of it.
- Allows for the customization of grouping of data records through development of formulas through a built-in programming interface.
- Through the creation of sub-reports with parameter links you can combine separate customized data reports into one report file.
- Through the programming interface, you can create formulas to summarize data from a subreport and include that value in the main report body, thus, developing a summary report from data of a variety of different subreports.
- It would be nice to have sometime of functionality that would better detect an improper linking of two or more tables. Sometimes I don't know that I have an improper link until after I run a report and realize data records are repeating.
- Sometimes the pass through of formula values from multiple sub reports to a main report can be in error based on the placement of the sub reports in relation to each other. It would be great to have functionality that warns you about those issues.
- There should be more intellisense provided in the formula interface when creating conditional statements.
I cannot compare Crystal Reports with other tools because I have not used anything like it. Most of my experience, when Crystal Reports was not available, was to use the default reporting capabilities of the accounting software and then doing a data dump in excel and then using excel to format and create customize grouping of data.