Craig, you seem to be pretty big on Crystal Reports. I am considering it due to limitations with Graph and Chart.

Quitely frankly, the VFP report writer, while certainly irritating at times, serves our needs. I have never found anything that I wanted to do that couldn't be done with the VFP report writer. Sure, most of the data has to be "preprocessed", but it would appear that the Crystal solution is no different (at least in the VFP environment i.e. the need to copy tables to FOX2X format or be forced into ODBC hell).

The limitations of graph are the main reason we are looking at Crystal. I am interested in be able to provide powerful charting capabilities into my app, and MSGraph doesn't cut it. Can you tell me whether you have used the charting tools available in Crystal and if they are cumbersome to use?

Also, my biggest concern with Crystal is installing the components. It is not acceptable to me to force my users to reinstall my application every time I add a new feature. Instead, I have an "updater" program which installs the necessary dlls/controls. While it may be true that I have to spend a little extra time finding and creating the necessary registry entries, it prevents the user from having to reinstall the application. What can you tell me about your experience programatically installing Cyrstal controls (I am not interested in installshield/wise, etc...I need to install them programatically).

Thanks in advance for any information you can provide...you seem to really like Crystal.