VFP's report designer allows you to create reports quickly but it lacks output functionality. When you run a report created in VFP you can either sent the output to a printer or write it to a text file or html file. The text file and html file does not at all look like the printed version. (It will look like something typed in Note pad). There also may be a better html converter program out there that I am not aware of that does a better job. You can also export the report to an rtf file but again there can be problems. The rtf converter program I used did not support all the features available in the VFP report designer so consequently the rtf file did not look like the printed version. Also the converter program I used ran slow.

VFP allows you to automate programs such as Excel or Word giving you the ability to write VFP information to these applications from VFP. Most of the features available in these programs can be controlled from VFP allowing you to make great reports. The down side to this is that it is relatively slow when VFP creates a report through one of these applications - waiting for VFP to generate a large report can be very time consuming.

VFP's report designer needs to be able to export its output directly to a file like Word or Word Perfect. For example, when a VFP report is run it would be nice if you not only had the option to print to a printer but also the option to write directly to Word or Word Perfect file.

A common way VFP can connect to other types of data sources is through odbc. Odbc works but it can be very slow making it impractical when you data source has a large amount of records.