SAP Crystal Reports is great (if you're forced to edit Crystal Reports)
April 18, 2017
SAP Crystal Reports is great (if you're forced to edit Crystal Reports)
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SAP Crystal Reports
We currently use SAP Crystal Reports primarily with Exact JobBoss as the report writer. All of our custom reporting is done in SAP Crystal Reports. We also utilize it to run reports from MS SQL databases instead of Microsoft's built-in reporting tool. While none of these are heavy duty custom reports we have several customers that require specialized packing slips/invoices that required moderate editing of the standard reports.
- Once you know how to use it, it is an incredibly powerful report editor.
- Makes custom database reports easy compared to Excel and other tools.
- Setting up rows in the reports to match the rows in the linked database is amazing when you're making list reports.
- The documentation is poor. Unless you are willing to pay for training don't expect to be able to write an amazing report just using the built-in docs.
- The design looks old. Everything feels like your working in 2007 not 2017. It has almost an identical feel and flow to Visual Studio 2008.
- Crystal Reports in general feels like an outdated technology, but we use it because no one has made anything better. Why there isn't a similar business oriented markup/html product I don't know. But since they are really the only good option and most ERP/Finance software already has it built in we use it.
- It's expensive for what it is.
We haven't used any similar products for actual reporting because all of our ERP systems have used Crystal Reports as their standard templates. For years we used those standard templates until customers began requesting custom barcodes and similar items on their invoices/packing slips. Before all of that, we used QuickBooks which has an integrated report editor that was much less powerful, but also much easier to use for the kinds of customization need.