Random Thoughts of Jorriss

# re: Crystal Reports Sucks

Hiya Jorriss..



Well....



I am currently trying to write a report in MS RS that I have in Crystal and designing the report is a nightmare in itself. No drag and drop, everything must be in a freakin table to group anything by..



This is better than Crystal??



Please explain how?

# re: Crystal Reports Sucks

Crystal Reports are extremely messy for use on the web. Have you ever seen the crappy markup that Crystal generates? Have you tried to calculate columns in an excel report that Crystal produced? How much time have you wasted debugging minor changes in your reports? Is Reporting Services perfect? Absolutely not! You should be able to hook into report event structure to pragmatically change fields and grouping text. The writing any kind of code is difficult at best. And I agree that the table structure is awkward. But getting reports out quickly is simple where Crystal is much more difficult. As I'm an old access programmer RS is familiar to me and I understand the paradigm that MS is attempting to convey. I haven't done any research on RS 2.0 but I'm sure the new version will be even easier to use.

# re: Crystal Reports Sucks

-- How much time have you wasted debugging minor changes in your reports?



In CR? Very little... We use stored procedures for all reports and the data is already there. All I need to do is do a few groupings, maybe a subreport or two and formatting of the data. I can layout the report in CR and give it a finished look in 1/6th the time it takes in RS. Almost all reports we have are not just tabular reports. I have had very little issues with Crystal to date in any reports I have written. Probably 100+ reports. The problem I am finding in RS is that the bulk of the time is spent on making the report look like what the user wants and without the WYSIWYG functions like CR has, it is extremely difficult. What you see in the layout is definately not what you get in the preview. We are using the 2.0 version or RS and Crystal 10.



Plus, just simple things like ....It takes 5 to 6 seconds to bold text in RS and have the layout designer come back so you do something else. CR does bold text instantly. It takes 5 to 6 seconds for RS to respond to ANY kind of command. Going from layout to preview is also very painstaking. I can make a change in CR and go to preview and see my changes instantly without is having to do some type of lengthy refresh of the screen.

All this adds to the report creation time for RS.



Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying CR doesnt have it's flaws. Of course it does, but I don't think RS is ready for prime time yet and from what I can see.. if CR sucks then RS is right there beside it sucking away, but for different reasons. I think by version 3.0 it will probably be the best reporting tool out there and we here at my worksite will probably migrate to it. I think it still needs a lot of work and a lot of things added to make it a finished product. As we know.. MS has both the talent and the money to do it all, if they so desire.



So rather than just saying RS sucks.. I will withhold judgement until v3.0 comes out.



Cheers!



DW

# re: Crystal Reports Sucks

Deploying our reports to the web is exactly why we swithed to LogiXML (www.logixml.com). We started with their free product, which was better than Crystals expensive product BTW, and recently upgraded to their Info product when we needed some dashboards and other items. That product was stil cheaper than the quote the Crystal guy gave us.