Is Crystal Reports important?
-
I know that in VS2003 that Crystal Reports is available. The question I have is, how important is it to know the intricate details of Crystal Reports these days? I mainly create worksheets in Excel for any reports I do. My clients seem fine with the form, but I am a bit of an Excel design hack. So what do you think? Do you use Crystal Reports in every day programming? If not, what do you do?
Jude
-
I know that in VS2003 that Crystal Reports is available. The question I have is, how important is it to know the intricate details of Crystal Reports these days? I mainly create worksheets in Excel for any reports I do. My clients seem fine with the form, but I am a bit of an Excel design hack. So what do you think? Do you use Crystal Reports in every day programming? If not, what do you do?
Jude
Well, as a developer, my favorite reporting tool is the ReportViewer in .NET 2.0. You can display tabular data and charts and it has several really helpful features, such as paging and a built in download to excel. The only problem is that out of the box it is built for use with Reporting Services (which I understand to be similar to Crystal Reports). With a little coding, however, you can use any datasource with it. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/microsoftreporting.aspx[^] I've used it with oracle and it works great. I will also do reports on a web page in ASP.NET if I need the user to be able to click a line item and either edit it or view details about the data. It kind of depends what the report needs to do, but IMO, and editable report isn't really a report.
Broken Bokken http://www.brokenbokken.com
-
Well, as a developer, my favorite reporting tool is the ReportViewer in .NET 2.0. You can display tabular data and charts and it has several really helpful features, such as paging and a built in download to excel. The only problem is that out of the box it is built for use with Reporting Services (which I understand to be similar to Crystal Reports). With a little coding, however, you can use any datasource with it. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/microsoftreporting.aspx[^] I've used it with oracle and it works great. I will also do reports on a web page in ASP.NET if I need the user to be able to click a line item and either edit it or view details about the data. It kind of depends what the report needs to do, but IMO, and editable report isn't really a report.
Broken Bokken http://www.brokenbokken.com
Remember that ReportViewer is the easiest way for PDF exportation of data in C# :)as the support is .NET 2.0 native and no driver/3rd party classes are needed.
-Spacix All your skynet questions[^] belong to solved