Thanks for the insight. As for reporting needs, high on my users list is export features which Crystal does great and VFP doesn't do at all (and I mean exporting a report not just raw data).

The one problem I'm trying to resolve, that neither make easy to do, is designing a report with optional columns and when columns are excluded, subsequent columns shift left. I may have to go back to creating these reports in code again...crap!

>We used Crystal Reports here at Micro Vane for over a year. It was seen as the super solution to our report needs. I even wrote several replys to UT members encouraging the use of Crystal.
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>Our solution was to design a crystal report that accessed our data through ODBC. We came up with all sorts of tricks to install ODBC on the users computer. We even came up with a registry class to create our ODBC driver for the users to use.
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>We used the CRPE from foxpro with a createobject to open our reports, do some manipulation, and run the report for the user. All this seemed like a great solution, but we had to jump through many hoops to pull it off.
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>Crystal also allowed us to write VB functions stored into a dll that could be used by our reports. This was a big help. But we did have to learn VB programming.
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>What this meant was that our install included installing VFP, VB, Crystal Reports, and ODBC on our end users machine. What a lot of work! But I did pull it off. I think I scared the hell out of our support department. There was a lot that could go wrong in the process.
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>Here's the down side. Our reports took forever to run and their size was quite large. Matter of fact, our DOS reports ran about 10 times faster. On History reports that were already taking 15 to 20 min in DOS, that was translating to reports that we never saw the end to.
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>We are now back to creating all our reports in VFP. I really feel that even though we had a few details to work out, that the reports are much easier in VFP.
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>So what about Crystal? I think you have to look at your needs. If your users are creating their own reports, Crystal is perfect. I have not seen anything that is easier for the end user to learn and create reports. This is what I feel Crystal is designed for. But if your need is that of a developer who creates canned reports for your users to run out of the box, I feel that that is easier to do from within fox.