Crystal Reports XI Developer

Crystal Reports XI is a powerful package, but it has a fussy, buggy user interface with abitrary behaviors. Plan to spend a fair amount of time guessing the exact input it is waiting for. It is kind of like a puzzle game.

Once you discover the tricks it works well, though.

Update Feb 27, 2008 - I have been preparing charts with CR XI now and I must say, the program is tear-your-hair fussy to work with. For example, attempts to do fine layout adjustments are tedious and a small adjustment to axis label font size changes the chart length, which begins a length round of small changes, each affecting some other layout aspect. I have spent hours laying out two charts. XI provides the apparent ability to change chart object colors--there is a menu--but the changes do not take. Specific example, the connector line between points on a line chart will remain the default color. This is a difficult program to deal with if you want to do much more than vanilla, tabular reporting with very simple charting. Try to avoid fine crafting, or plan to spend 2-3 times the time you originally estimated to get it right.

You might expect that a program has been around as long as Crystal Reports would be very stable and easy to work with as there has been plenty of time to refine it. However, the nature of complex software is that it tends not to age well. Perhaps Crystal has reached that point its age is working against it.

I was using Crystal Reports 7 and upgraded to this version. The exported reports are improved over the previous version and it now includes Adobe Acrobat, along with Excel, HTML, Word, RTF, and text. It was easy to create and integrate the reports into my existing database programs I created with Microsoft Visual Studio. There is an extensive library of functions to use in producing professional looking and useful reports. Now you can choose whether to use the Crystal Reports programming language or Basic programming language. This is a very powerful tool and will pay for itself in time saved and customer satisfaction.