>Thanks for the information Walter. I received Cyrstal Developers ed several days ago and have been playing with it. I plan on writing a test "update object" to test out the installation of the Crystal drivers. These update objects will be based on objects currently in production which work flawlessly <g>.
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>I definitely have a real concern about the number of drivers and different locations necessary. It would have been much cleaner of Crystal if they didn't require 3 separate distribution locations (i.e. windows\system, progra~1\seagate\shared and \windows\seagate (or crystal)). This dramatically increases the time required to verify files (i.e. to ADIR the directories) and compare with source version on LAN.). In addition, the updater has to deal with Windows 9x and NTx. I can imagine what issues this will create in the future based on past experience.

You can do a FILE() on each one. Much faster than ADIR().

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>If I remember correctly, one of your justifications (or maybe it was Craig) was that Crystal is more portable to back ends, etc. I agree with this, and I believe it is a strong point to consider in deploying Crystal. This is definitely an advantage in being able to leverage future work, etc. However, I have learned how to leverage the VFP report writer, and if it wasn't for graphing and charting, I probably wouldn't consider Cyrstal at this time.

My reason for using Crystal was that a client required reports in Excel format. It's easier to do it with Crystal than Automation. Once I started using it, I decided to move all reporting to it.

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>Since Crystal's RDC is being so tightly coupled with VB, it makes it very difficult to translate, as the RDC in VB allows real time development and viewing of properties/methods. In VFP, it's all a big secret. Even though you can read the VB code, the paradigm is much more complicated.
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>I hope to make a final decision on deploying Crystal today. If I decide to proceed, I would very much like to share my experience with all of you and hopefully help others as you and Craig have.

I'd like to hear about your decision as well as your good and bad perceptions about the product.