Crystal is expensive, complicated, bloated and slow.
Many big companies are using it, but I don't know the reason.

FastReport can't compare with crystal when it comes to functionality, but
ReportBuilder will beat the hell out of crystal in end-user design and also
end-user data-access (I have only used the demo of RB, but it was fantastic)

Also, (despite of many bugs and problems I heard of) Nevrona ships a very
interesting tool(Report Printer).
Their main problem is, that they don't stick to common design and
usability-conventions, but they have a very good solution when it comes to
large scalable apps. Nevrona will ship a report-server which can provide the
report-data for the clients, thus making reporting a true n-tier
architecture. This ensures a really good scalability and performance for
reports and makes it feasible for use in data-warehouse and
business-analysis tools. The client has the preview-form, but the preview
itself will be built on the report-server and only the already processed and
formatted data will be trnsferred to the client. This decreases
network-load, and also speeds report-creation, as one dedicated high-spec
server can calulate multiple reports faster with low-spec lients than many
high-spec clients (cost, cost, and again, cost)

Well, having seen several reporting-soultions in the past few months, I must
admit, that anybody who actually likes Crystal reports has definitely missed
a few goodies.



CU, Kaputnik
(Nick Josipovic)

nick@... <mailto:nick@...>
kap@... <mailto:kap@...>
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Magnus Johansson [mailto:trans-x@...]
> Sent: Friday, February 23, 2001 1:12 AM
> To: IBObjects@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [IBO] Reporting Tools
>
>
> Time to time this question comes up and always FastReport and
> ReportBuilder comes up.
> I have used Crystal Reports a couple of years now (since ver 3.5
> or something) and I like it very much, soon it's time for me (as
> new to IBObjects and IB) to start digging in on reports. My
> thoughts so far at the moment is to go for easysofts ODBC and
> Crystal. I hesitate a little because there is not many that
> mention Crystal Reports in this community, are there any of you
> that can share any knowledge about Crystal Reports vs other
> reporting tools?
>
> I don't like all dll's that comes with Crystal Reports but thats
> something one have to take I guess because I like it a lot!
>
> Regards, Magnus.
>