>>>I'm thinking that if we had this 'universal repoort writer' it would require us to have a common data format (CDF).
>>
>>The only thing I would prefer throwing at a report writer is XML since it can have such irregular, describtive data. Unfortunalty, on todays machines the sets are too large and slow... but in 2 years, who knows.
>>
>>Menus could be very similar with XML.
>
>
>Crystal Reports 8.5 supports XML for both data source and as export. I don't know how extensive that support is because I haven't played with it yet.


I forgot to add that it also supports ADO for input.