Crystal ReportsReleased with Visual Basic, Crystal Reports is the brainchild of Microsoft. In fact, this comes as an answer to people's questions that Microsoft Applications are the best coded applications but do not facilitate reporting. Compatible with applications like Visual Studio, Crystal reports has become the basic report whether in a customized or an OEM form. This software is essentially an amalgamation of ActiveX Controls that provides a user interface when embedded in GUI. Crystal Reports - Its Origin Crystal Services, Inc has been credited with the release of the first version of Crystal Reports. The release of the first version was followed by release of two simultaneous versions. Crystal Decisions/Seagate Software, the organization which released versions 4.0 to 9.0 was later acquired by Business Objects. Business Objects is responsible for release of version 10 and version 11 - the two latest Crystal Reports versions. The methodology of Crystal Reporting You can install the Crystal Reports application on your computer. It is not a bulky application hence would not consume a lot of space on your hard disk. Select the rows and columns of specific data from data tables. Once the data is selected, arrange them as on the format of the report and save the report. You will be able to save the report as a .RPT extension file which can be read as an Acrobat or an Excel file. Please note that data from select sources like - Databases (Sybase, IBM, DB2, Oracle etc), Excel Spreadsheets, Text files, XML Files are supported by this application. Running of Crystal Reports Crystal Reports can be run through your local PC or through the Internet. Running these applications locally would enable the users to change any specifications of the report from the designer view itself. This software can also be run locally without the need of the entire software. Crystal reports software can be run as independent components on your PC. Get the best benefits of crystal reports by running independent viewers, schedulers and report generation modules. A range of 4 Business Objects portal products allow the running of crystal reports through the internet. Independent providers like RippleStone and RePortal have also customized their web portal products to allow the implementation of Crystal Reports. Crystal Reports - What the critics say? No doubt, Crystal reports are robust, reporting software but critics have challenged the increase in download time due to long identifiers in HTML reports. The other limitation is that you cannot build an array of more than 1000 elements allowing you to use Crystal reports on a limited range of data. Crystal Reports - A Summary Crystal Reports is the prime business intelligence reporting system used for designing and report generation. |