Hello,

The people I contract with use Crystal Reports heavily. They strongly and highly suggest that I use Crystal Reports over VFP Reports whenever possible.

I experienced a learning curve, but once I played with Crystal for a couple of weeks, it got easier. I taught myself, so I think that says something about its ease of use. I did purchase a couple of books to get me started because the manual was not clear on how to do some real business apps with charts and graphs. I also relied heavily on the Crystal website knowledge base for my questions and answers because I was doing some wild and crazy things with number crunching and percentages that required some Crystal programming.

I found the hardest part of Crystal to be learning the new programming language although it reminds one of other programming languages and is not hard to learn, it's unique enough to make things difficult at first. Of course, most simple reports, charts and graphs don't need any programming and they are a piece of cake, but my charts for work get pretty hairy sometimes and required quite a bit of Crystal progamming (that's mainly why I purchased the books that showed the most programming examples).

In fact, the company I contract with is about to embark on a complete rewrite of most of their reports and I am probably the lucky one who gets to write them a custom reporting/graphing/charting system based upon Crystal Reports.

Hope this helps.