Hi kevin,

For a change I have to chime in.

>Many people bitch (with some justification) about Crystal's interface and other quirky aspects of the product. I'll grant you, CR's designer is not for the faint of heart, but when it comes to core reporting functionality and advanced formatting features, CR remains the best game in town (for now)

Having used CR since version 6, it was a true advancement from the VFP report writer. I've been using 7, 8.5 and 10. Tried to do 8, but that was the most worthless version I've seen. CR7 reports did not run as they did on 7 and had to redo all graphing. Got back in town with 8.5 and though now in version 10, (did not actually buy 11 since the lack of true benefits). The sad part is that after all those years, there isn't actually much improvement in the product from an end-user pov. I'd would have expect some reall improvements in graphing and crosstabs.

Further the statitical part of it, is somewhat lacking. Using tables and crosstabs are missing a lot of possibilities to calculate the right percentages. Crosstabs, while on hand very powerfull are also very limited, esspecially when wanting two different columns (numbers and percentages) next to eachother. I always found myself working arround the issue. Sometimes it can be done with overlaying crosstabs and graphs, in other cases, you need to numbercrunch things in VFP cursors before passing it to Crystal.

Eventually, I always manage things to get done, but esspecially for the complex reports it takes a big bag of dirty tricks (e.g., calcluating runnng percentages with the help of weighted averages), which leave so much room for improvement.

To be fair, some of the issues I had were solved in 10. However, I need to do those statistical reports on 8.5 as 10 does not run on Windows 98 which is a requirement.

So far the bitching part. Like you, I've found no other package (that cheap anyways) that offer so many features for my usage. I've globally looked in the VFP9 report writer and attended Collins and Lisa's workshop, the two have their own strenghts and weaknesses. For the reporting I do Crystal seems the best choice in most cases, though I must admit I'm impressed with some of the VFP9 features as well. I've seemlessly integrated Crystal my applications, with all the advanced features like exporting for all kinds of format, real time group changing, real time filtering, hyperlinking, hanlding pictures, on demand sub reports, etc. Overall I'm very happy with crystal though there remains a huge personal wishlist open.

Walter,




>Kevin