David:

Don't start with version 6.x and convert them to version 7. The 6.0 files don't really get optimized with 7.0 features. Crystal, like VFP report writer isn't object oriented. We had reports with similar layouts that had to become sub-reports to be able to use them in different reports. This appeared to cause some slowdowns.

I didn't do more than 2 of our reports in Crystal, so I'm reporting second-hand info. Our reports have many different options for including or excluding items. In order to generate Windows reports that had the same functionality as our DOS reports, it was necessary to set a limit of 10 groups. If a report only used 3 of the groups, Crystal 6 was allowed us to suppress the printing of the other 7 groups. However, Crystal seemed to generate the 7 groups during the process and then just didn't print what wasn't needed. We also had to use VB to return strings that were formatted the way we wanted them.
After our Depletion report took maybe 10 times as long to generate as our DOS report, we had to re-think the process. Now, that we were alot smarter, we discovered that we could generate the VFP reports on the fly by writing records directly to the .rpx file where we only generated the 3 groups needed. Again, I'm not working on the reporting aspects, but they seem much faster. They are still tedious to do.

If your reports are pretty much "canned", Crystal (IMO) will give you greater flexibility. I'd really like to sub-class reporting objects and re-use when ever needed or to inherit their behavior and tweak it slightly, as needed. But I doubt that that will be in VFP 7.0. Our app is not C/S nor Web based. It's basically a highly customized Inventory system tailored specifically for the beverage distribution industry. (Maybe a total market of 3500 users. We have something under 800 of those users and have the largest # of sites. We have a substantial portion of the smallest distributors.)

I can get more info from the guys working on the reporting aspects of our app.

HTH