The royalties are the problem for me. I want a product that I can include and not care whether my customer uses it or not. Tracking users for royalties is just a way to employ lawyers and complicate business.

We have Crystal and we worked up some reports for our users. We designed them so that our users could use them as a starting point for custom reports. When several of my customers heard that they would have to buy the full product to make their own custom report, the negative feedback I got made me wish I had never even distributed anything. In fact, we have removed all the Crystal stuff. I had the same problem with PCPlus. My customers don't want to buy this and that and have to figure out how to get everything working and I don't want to have to provide free/included support for other products with no related income.

>Distribution can be tricky, but Crystal Decisions now supplies merge modules to do this. There are MBs, but that adds TONS of capabilities such as exporting to PDF, HTML, Word, Excel and others and doing things like charting and mapping.
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>Crystal also ships with a WYSIWYG designer that you can distribute to your end users, but additional royalties are required.
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>>Hi Craig,
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>>Honestly, I haven't used Crystal and do not know much about it except what I hear from those I know who do use it. And they say it's heavy (MBs and MBs of things to distribute) and difficult to learn. I guess making your own end-user report designer via the Crystal API calls would take more time than I am willing to invest. But again, I speak from second-hand knowledge only.
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>>If you have some juicy information about Crytal to share, please do.
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>>See ya,
>>Paul