Crystal reports sux the big one.

Just had to get that off my chest.

blindman

I agree whole-heartdly with you on this!

wow, way to dredge up a 13-month-old post, stormy

crystal has its uses

for example, ain't it supposed to be good at turning this type of result set --

foo 123 a
foo 123 b
foo 123 c
foo 456 p
foo 456 q
bar 567 t
bar 567 u
bar 567 v
bar 567 w

into this type of output --

foo
- 123
- - a
- - b
- - c
- 456
- - p
- - q
bar
- 567
- - t
- - u
- - v
- - w

what sux an even bigger one is people trying to do this with pure sql

Everybody here on dbforums seems to positively hate Crystal. I'm not very clear on why, but they do... I don't use Crystal a lot, but it seems like an Ok report writer tool to me.

I suspect that people are trying to use Crystal for things it was never intended. I'll concede that it makes an awful video game, and a rather poor word processor, but it was never intended to be either of those things!

Am I missing something?

-PatP

First let me put on my flame retardant suit.
OK .....
Would you consider Access to be a decent reporting tool fot MS SQLServer ?

yes, i would

and in fact it has a reporting feature that few other front ends have -- crosstabs!!!

Actually I think crystal reports does have its place. Does a good job for what it does but one thing we figured out pretty fast, never let it create its own queries. Always create the queries yourself and point crystal to it.

I can't think of any tool that I'll let roll my queries. That may be because I get queries that are a lot uglier than usual, but if I let a GUI tool have a shot at most of my queries, I wouldn't live long enough to prove if they were correct or not!

-PatP

My wife does reporting for her company's ADP data and is forced to use their GUI tool for reporting. Besides the many limitations she has using the software you would be amazed what it can do with a query. I've help debug some the of the crap that comes out of it. Its something to behold.

Yes, Crystal will turn this:

foo 123 a
foo 123 b
foo 123 c
foo 456 p
foo 456 q
bar 567 t
bar 567 u
bar 567 v
bar 567 w

into this:

foo
- 123
- - a
- - b
- - c
- 456
- - p
- - q
bar
- 567
- - t
- - u
- - v
- - w

...but what half-way decent reporting tool won't? The fact that a Yugo will get you from your driveway to the Quicky-Mart does not make it a good car.

Access reporting is superior to Crystal, and I have used both extensively.

There is a lot of overlap, of course, and each has some features that the other does not have, but in the end Crystal's lack of event-driven programming makes it a truly lousy development platform.

Crystal is a piece of shareware masquerading as and Enterprise Solution.

The best reporting tool I've heard of so far is Active Reports. The developers in my office rave about it's superiority to Crystal.

I'll grant you that, right off of the bat. The lack of a Tex interpreter makes both Crystal and Access poor typesetting tools, and the lack of a Perl interpreter makes them both less than ideal script managers.

Looking at Crystal as a report writer, I don't see those as glaring faults. I certainly wouldn't try to develop an application using Crystal, any more than I'd attempt it using Access. That doesn't mean that I don't use both Access and Crystal, and like them for what they do well too!

-PatP