>So what are these reports, anyway? Some alien window that pops up with the
>data nicely formatted?

That's if you do Preview: otherwise, it goes to the printer.

The benefits to what John is doing are:

1) You only do the work once -- if you want to print to paper or preview, you don't have to use the overhead of cross-process marshalling, and if you want to output to .DOC, you're still all set.

2) WYSIWIG report design, as opposed to write code, test it, write code, test it, etc.