Crystal Reports or MS Access and Excel

[drog]

Is their anything that can be done in Crystal Reports that can not be done in Access, Excel, and the rest of office developer? Does Crystal Reports have any advantages?

Thanks for your reply

 

[MichaelRed]

IMHO, crystal reports MUST be the result of some secrete/shady deal between MS and Seagate. I know of nothing except the capability to "Slant" text (text on a slope, not Italics) which is not EASIER in MS. Access than Crystal Reports. One actual advantage of Crystal reports is that they are / can be seperate from your db. Your customers can use Crystal Reports tp access the data and generate their own reports - without having access to your forms/queries/table(s) [designs]/modules ...IF you provide only a MDE version.

You CLOULD achieve much the same by splitting the into several pieces with security and setting permissions appropiatley.

MichaelRed
m.red@att.net

There is never time to do it right but there is always time to do it over

 

[eckhardt]

During work in a multi-million dollar lawsuit, I discovered a 'bug' in the graphing component of ACCESS (97 and 2000) which could not be resolved by Microsoft. I had to do a simple line graph of a linear regression line for some thousands (+-2700) of individuals.
When we looked at the graphs we discovered that the graph of an individual would be duplicated randomely on the next record with no apparent reason, or pattern.

We cannot tolerate any errors in work of this nature and so dumped Access reporting for Crystal.

 

[drog]

"During work in a multi-million dollar lawsuit, I discovered a 'bug' in the graphing component of ACCESS (97 and 2000) which could not be resolved by Microsoft. I had to do a simple line graph of a linear regression line for some thousands (+-2700) of individuals.
When we looked at the graphs we discovered that the graph of an individual would be duplicated randomely on the next record with no apparent reason, or pattern."

That's interesting, do you have more information on this (i.e. can the issue be reproduced on a different database, can it be reproduced on a different machine with different hardware, etc.)?

Although my evaluation is over, my customer currently uses Excel to produce the graphs from Access tables. My problem with Crystal Reports is it has a hard time using tables independantly in a report, which is necessary for the reports they do. Either product should normally be fine to complete most tasks.

Thanks for the replies.

 

[sue1127]

I'm starting to consider switching from Crystal to Access. We use a Sybase database and are looking into distributing budget reports on the web. Crystal has confusing and expensive restrictions and requirements for web
distribution. Would I be losing capabilities in calculations or presentation by switching? Also, what would be the best way to distribute the reports on the web, keeping in mind that each department head must be able to see only his/her budget lines.

Thanks very much.

Sue

 

[drog]

I'm not really sure if Access has native support for online distribution, but I don't think you'll loose any capabilities if you use Access and Excel together. I don't think Access by itself has very powerful reporting tools, but I could be wrong. In any case, I think you may have to use ASP if you go with Microsoft products, but this is really uncharted territory for me.

I did recently get spammed with another reporting program, which may be of interest to you. Please keep in mind I have no experience with it, but it may warrant looking into it further.

http://www.intelliview.com/tt

In this program the client is free.

 

[Trainingjason]

To my knowledge Access can not easily do non linear groupings, such as grouping the following quantities

1 - 5
6 - 14
15 - 44
45 - 1000
place the rest in not needed

In crystal I can easily accomplish this.

I do think there are issues with the broadcast licences, it is possible to purchase a 3rd party viewer in crystal, or alternatively to write a simple app calling the activex control in vb for distribution purposes





Jason