need help/advice for creating reports

[bobetko]

I am not sure I am on the right place, but let's try.

I need a report tool which will allow me to enter SQL statement and as a product to get result that I can save as XLS, CSV, etc... I would like to be able to choose field delimiter if possible.

At work, on daily base I have to create little reports for various things. I usually spend 5 minutes writing SQL statement and 35 minutes copying and pasting and trying to give decent look to the report.

In SQL Query Analyzer (short QA) I can save result in RPT format which is, at least from my point of view, waste of time. Usually I would copy columns from QA and paste it to Excel and there I would start chasing my columns. The most anoying thing is I have to retype all the column/field names since they can't be copied and pasted, and sometime there are a lot of them.

Is there some tool that can help me with this?

I tried Crystal (ver. 9) and gave up. Is there anything else? Thanks.

 

[Crystalguru]

Here's my two cents:

Crystal Reports will allow you to export your results to XLS, PDF, CSV, etc.

If you know your joins/relationships from writing the select statements in QA, then using Crystal is that much easier. Why did you give up on Crystal? What was it's limitation as you saw it?

If you go to reporting services, you still have to format the data, along with having all the necessary software to run it. Do you have this already installed?

My two cents.

 

[toddl]

Hi,

Would using Access work in your situation? I've found using access is even simpler then using Crystal. If your not doing any formatting, and just looking for a tool to export the data to xls or csv, Access should do just fine.

I'm sure everyone has their preference though,

Good Luck,

Todd

 

[xlbo]

or indeed, just use the MSQuery add-in within MS Excel which allows you to return data via an SQL statement directly into Excel

Rgds, Geoff

We could learn a lot from crayons. Some are sharp, some are pretty and some are dull. Some have weird names and all are different colours but they all live in the same box.

Please read FAQ222-2244 before you ask a question

 

[wwwSQLOBSERVERcom]

Hi bobetko,

There's no right or wrong answer I guess, it would really depend on:
- volume of data
- complexity of analysis/extract
- type of analysis (multidimensional data?)
- budget (how much can you spend?)
- mode of delivery

Any ideas?

http://www.SQLobSERVER.com

the Microsoft BI/DW community