>>So we are looking for something that can create files very quickly. In your experience with Crystal reports can it run as efficiently as the VFP report writer when creating files?
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>Crystal Reports is awesome. But... It doesn't work natively with VFP5- you have to use ODBC support. Once you get over that, the things you CAN do will exceed the things you NEED to do with Crystal Reports. I know the die-hard VFPers would rather use the built in reporting module, but Crystal is much easier to develop reports(IMO)
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>Crystal Analysis and the accompanying suite looks pretty fascinating too. I haven't used it, but it looks like a well-designed set of dictionaries could completely remove the IS manager from the report fulfillment process. (which give the IS manager time to do other work, and lets Marketing/Accounting/etc. get whatever they want when they want it)

Another option to ODBC is using FOX2X tables. In my apps, I do all the work in VFP to get the result set the user requires for a report and put the result set in a FOX2X table, which CR can access natively, for Crystal to run from.