SAP Crystal Reports

Fully customizable Report tool suits for the entire company. Even without an expert in programing Crystal Report can be used to deliver decision-making reports. Very easy configuration with MS SQL, MS Access, and much more other databases.

Could not notice any big cons up to now.

I love how I can take data from our database and present it in a pleasing way for our users. I have been using Crystal Reports for almost 20 years and find it very powerful. I can build a report very quickly and a few simple format changes and make it look professional. I developed a program to run a series of reports with parameters passed from the program. I can do our month end process in minutes instead of running 100 reports one at a time. So it is great for creating a report and easy to add to a .NET program to be run automagically. Pretty cool!

It can be time consuming to build a complex report with lots of formulas. Not a fault of the software. Just the process is long at times when you have over 100 formulas. It would be nice if there was a feature where you could easily clone a formula and then change it quickly for each situation. Although, maybe in a newer version of CR this might be possible.

The ability to customize reports is helpful.
Comprehensive. The system has the ability to report on many aspects of business.

Difficult to learn report writing requirements.
Trial and error yields unproductive data reporting.
Once parameters are established for requests, downloading data fields is sometimes slow.

simple and cost effective
tight integration with sap
easy deployment and scalability

user interactiveness on report designs, lacks ease of use for end users to build reports of their own.

Connects to SQL and it gets the data as needed, and with the right formulas and know how, you can customize the reports to your liking get as specific as you need.

Dated interface and not the most user friendly. If you have never used it, getting it set up and running might be a little confusing, but if you know some basic SQL, you can make it do what you need.