Crystal Reports - A solid performer for data analysis
Updated January 08, 2018
Crystal Reports - A solid performer for data analysis
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
SAP Crystal Reports
Overall Satisfaction with SAP Crystal
As a healthcare organization, analytics is extremely important as well as data mining. Our electronic medical records and practice management solutions were lacking so we used Crystal Reports to fill the gaps. Crystal Reports is only used by me for design, but several of our staff use the report runner feature to just update parameters and run the reports. We are able to dig deep into practice performance by creating our own reports that pull in a much larger scale of data than what is allowed by our medical records system. We also can create detailed exports for patient mailings based on specific criteria requirements such as certain diagnosis codes in conjunction with billing procedure codes.
- Crystal Reports is extremely flexible. You can connect to pretty much any type of database as well as multiple databases at one time as long as there is a field to join the two sets of data.
- The layout is easy to use and extremely versatile. You can insert tables, grouping, color changed headings and background. There is a multitude of charts, graphs, and tables that can be inserted to make reports more visually appealing.
- Data can be displayed in many different ways using formulas, charts, colors, images, etc.
- While the layout is easy to use, it should be improved to work with touchscreens. Some of the fields are small and with many laptops, tablets and touch-enabled PCs in the workplace today, it would be nice to not need a mouse.
- Exporting is a bit bulky. There should be some options for quick exports to common types like pdf, xls, etc. I would frequently export to xls, so a saved preference that allows me to click that button and auto-export would save time when creating multiple exports.
- Sharing can be bulky as well. I typically download reports and email. An integration with Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox, etc would be helpful.
- PowerBI
Crystal Reports is much more robust when looking for details and drill down data. PowerBI is geared more towards the visuals and does not give you as many options for creating basic data reports. Crystal allows you the flexibility to create a simple report or to add in graphics to make it more visually appealing.