Hi craig,

>>As Craig says, it really depends on the complexity of the report. There are a few things that are easier with VFP reports than crystal. Printing pictures is one of them. Overall, Crystal is a far more powerfull reportwriter than the VFP one. Even if you'll compare with the new VFP report writer in VFP 9.0, Crystal is far more advanced. However integrating crystal into your VFP project is not that easy if you want to do it well, and distribution of the runtimes for crystal is also one to consider (DLL hell).
>
>Distribution was easier with Crystal 9 than previous versions. WIth CR 10, Business Objects has made it even easier.

AFAIK, there are still problems in running two different crystal versions on one machine. This makes it harder for those cases where the client wants to install two products with two different crystal version requirements. I've had to spend several hours from my office to determine that a faulty client had some DLLs installed of version 8 while the product was using the CRPE engine of version 7. This problem is something that is not applicable when using products build on two different VFP versions. In that respect many developer tools could learn from VFP.

I don't know the details about CR 9 and 10 since they do not offer too much of improvements on the report designer and RDC component. When evaluating CR 10, I was disappointed to see the improvements relative to CR 8.5 when it comes to creating even more advanced reports. Some little things remain a nightmare in Crystal. Summaries on group based summaries are only available in grids and cross tabs: you cannot create formula fields based on summaries which forces you to do the calculation in advance in your data export. Another simple thing is to create newspaper style columns where the records are drawn from "down then across", but the columns are equally sized.

Walter,