Reporting?

[kpizza]

I need you help....tell me why or how access is good for reporting? Im buidling a business case and am deciding on using either crystal or access. Thank you!

 

[rjoubert]

1. If your company already has Microsoft Access, they won't have to buy Crystal Reports.

2. If you use Access for reports, the reports and data can potentially be all contained in one file, making installation and maintenance easier.

3. Access reports can provide just as robust a presentation of data as Crystal reports.

 

[lameid]

My experience with Crystal is very limited but I have heard others say that Access is much more versatile...


Access readily allows the data source to be changed easily where as Crystal dies if you change it (maybe an integration issue with the Application I use?).
So if I want a report that looks like another, but it is say for sales instead of purchases, in Access I can just change to a query that gives me the other data and maybe change a few labels... In Crystal, it seems the controls are bound to the FQN and will force you to recreate every single last control. Just as likely, you may have an object for different criteria like instead of showing sales leaders by sales rep, it may show sales by supplier.

On the flip side, I think the Crystal viewer is free so you only have to buy the designer once (although you get the same with Access if you buy the Visual Studio Tools for office; gives you an Access runtime). Crystal uses less resources than Access.


Things I would ask...

Does Crystal support a programming language? I.e. can you resize controls in a section programmatically and conditionally turn subreports on and off? Can you change the data source of subreports?

Who is writing the reports? Do they know one product extremely well? How much would it cost to retrain them in another product? How much productivity will be lost while they are being trained? Is one product already in place? You can get by with one copy of Visual Studio Tools, every Developer will need his own license, which is cheaper Access or Crystal?