Crystal
Reports needs very little introduction - it's a recognized leader among report
generators. In addition, Microsoft has bundled Crystal Reports intoMicrosoft
Visual Studio
for several years, so most veteran
Visual Basic
programmers are
familiar with it. Then Microsoft decided to build a report writer (DataReport)
and include it with Visual Basic. Now, although Visual Studio 6 still includes
an earlier version of Crystal Reports, you have to know where to look to find
it on the Visual Studio disks.
If
you're only experience with Crystal Reports is the version packaged with Visual
Studio, forget everything you know and get the 8.5 demonstration version;
there's no comparison between version 8.5 and the version in Visual Studio. And
Microsoft's DataReport is no competition at all. Seagate
Software, the company that produces Crystal Reports, was recently renamed
Crystal Decisions. The release of Crystal Reports 8.5 quickly followed, but
it's much more than a simple interim version. There are many new features that
make an upgrade to version 8.5 an excellent decision. Although the ability to
integrate reporting and analysis into intranet, extranet, and portal
applications with Crystal Enterprise is reason enough, Crystal Reports 8.5 now
supports cross-platform development, with support for Windows NT, Windows 2000,
and UNIX. OLAP support is also much improved. The Report Publishing Wizard publishes
reports to the Web in seconds. In addition to these impressive new features,
there are enhancements to the Report Designer, analysis tools, export formats,
and report viewers. An
ambitious product, Crystal Reports 8.5 has very versatile reporting
capabilities. You can use Crystal Reports as a stand-alone report generator,
writing ad hoc queries against a wide variety of data sources. There's nothing
very remarkable about accessing databases with ODBC or even native drivers;
those are standard features in a report generator. Crystal Reports 8.5 goes far
beyond database and PIM support to include Lotus Notes and Domino, Microsoft
Exchange, Microsoft IIS, Microsoft SMS, Windows NT event logs, and NCSA-format
Web server activity logs. When you do need to pull data from a SQL database,
Crystal Reports can handle XML, OLAP, and relational data sources. Crystal
Reports excels at publishing data. You can create presentation-quality reports
and publish those reports to the Web in seconds. There are many options for
exporting reports: PDF, HTML, DHTML, XML, RTF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel,
a variety of text formats, a variety of e-mail formats, etc. With
Crystal Reports 8.5 you can deliver rich, interactive content via the Web using
Web reports that go far beyond static tables and forms. Available report
viewers include a Netscape plug-in, Java, ActiveX, and DHTML. Interactive
viewers let users drill down on charts and subreports, and even perform local
printing and local exports. Crystal Reports
8.5 is not just a stand-alone report generator. It also integrates with
Microsoft Office 97 and Microsoft Office 2000. Crystal Reports 8.5 takes
advantage of Office's Add-in technology to automatically add report design
capabilities to Excel and Access. Creating a report is as simple as selecting a
spreadsheet, table, or query, then launching the Crystal Report Wizard. Crystal
Reports 8.5 integrates with the Microsoft Visual Basic 5 and Visual Basic 6
IDEs. It also integrates with the VBA IDE (the VBE) in Office 2000. You can
open, design, and customize reports directly from the VB IDE/VBE. Crystal
Reports 8.5 gives developers unprecedented flexibility, with a range of
components for Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual InterDev, Visual C++, Lotus Domino
Designer, Informix NewEra, and Delphi. The developer version of Crystal Reports
8.5 adds a new COM-based component for embedding drag-and-drop report creation
to your applications. You can interact with Crystal Reports through an ActiveX
control, an Automation Server (OLE) interface, the Crystal Reports Print Engine
API, a Delphi VCL control, or a class library for MFC. Installation
of version 8 could be, well, exasperating. Once you got version 8 loaded, the
system was so extensive it was difficult to figure out where to start. Quite to
the contrary, installation of version 8.5 is quick and easy. And because
version 8.5 includes a familiar Microsoft Office look and feel, getting started
is equally as easy. Crystal
Reports 8.5 is available in three editions that progressively add more
capabilities. The Standard Edition provides report design and report
publication features. The Professional Edition adds Web publishing features.
The Developer Edition includes powerful development tools and samples. The
professional and developer editions of Crystal Reports 8.5 include a five-user
license for Crystal Enterprise. Crystal Enterprise replaces the Web
capabilities from earlier versions of Crystal Reports with a new Web-based
report publishing system. Crystal Enterprise can be deployed in single server
or multi-server environments, and it's cluster-enabled. The result is highly
scalable and reliable information reporting. I tested
Crystal Reports 8.5 on two machines: a 750 MHz Pentium III laptop with 256 MB
of RAM running Windows 98, and a dual 866 MHz Pentium III processor server with
1 GB of RAM running Windows 2000 Server. Crystal
Reports 8.5 is impressive, but not perfect. Version 8.5 corrects some obvious
blemishes, but there are a few features that still leave me muttering. One that
especially perturbs me is the way Crystal Reports handles multi-line text
boxes. If you want your text boxes to grow, and you want to stack them
vertically, you need to separate them into distinct sections to prevent text
bleeding across text boxes. Microsoft Access reports handle "can grow" text
boxes much more gracefully. With
that said, forget the DataReport in Visual Basic. Crystal Reports 8.5 continues
to be the product of choice for adding powerful reporting capabilities to your
applications. Glenn Mitchell is president of .Com Consulting Group, a
consulting firm in Tallahassee, Florida, specializing in Microsoft enterprise
solutions. In addition to consulting, he lectures and writes about enterprise
application development for Microsoft-sponsored conferences and journals, such
as Microsoft OfficePRO. He can be
reached at mailto:[email protected]. With
versatile reporting capabilities, Crystal Reports is a recognized leader among
report generators. Version 8.5 is more than a simple interim version. New
features include the ability to integrate reporting and analysis into intranet,
extranet, and portal applications with Crystal Enterprise. In addition, it now
supports cross-platform development, with support for Windows NT, Windows 2000,
and UNIX. It continues to be the product of choice for adding powerful
reporting capabilities to your applications. Crystal
Decisions Phone: (800) 720-8586 Web
Site: http://www.crystaldecisions.net Price: Crystal Reports 8.5 Standard,
US$199; Crystal Reports 8.5 Professional, US$395; Crystal Reports 8.5
Developer, US$495. Upgrades and multi-user licenses are available for the
Professional and Developer editions. What Does
It Do?
Installation
How Good Is
It?
asp.netPRO Fact File
Crystal Reports 8.5
Upgrades continue versatile reporting capabilities
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