(Some disclosure: I am working with the development of Foxfire! however I have used it and included it in apps before that)

The new version of Foxfire! (evaluation available for download at http://www.foxfirereporting.com) does attempt to deal with some of the usability issues that were being mentioned here but I can agree that part of the UI was based on what a programmer thought would be easy - however, that UI had been field-tested by a variety of users and did work well with them.

The challenge with Foxfire! (and any report-writing tool in my opinion) is building a user-friendly data dictionary. It's all well in good when you have 3 tables with obvious names but most applications these days have lots and lots of tables and thus it makes it difficult for end-users to figure out what comes from where.

As a result, there is some "developer-training" involved (I say this from integrating Foxfire! into 5 custom apps as well as training end-users on lots of Foxfire! integrations). It's not enough to simply drop your tables into a data dictionary and say "go for it - here's your adhoc reporting". Even if you use DBC (or DBCX in the case of Stonefield) to provide friendly captions, you still need to think about what your users will expect. Will they understand a normalized environment where a Customer may have multiple phone numbers stored in a CUSTPHONE table (for example)?

Foxfire! 8 does try to make this easier to work with so I do suggest taking a look at it, especially if you've worked with earlier versions. The Data Item Group Editor can make it easier to categorize your tables into more meaningful descriptions.

Sorry if it sounds like I'm advertising - I just wanted to jump in and give my two cents on the challenges of ad-hoc report writing.

Andrew