Crystal Reports

[RJ]

I have a collegue who is keen to use crystal reports to analyse an Access database. I'm more comfortable using the reporting features in Access.

Can someone please let me know what advantages there would be in using Crystal rather than Access.
Trying to build an argument for Access.

Thanks

Richard

 

[GlennL]

I personally find that there isn't a great deal of difference in the two so far as building reports goes. Although, the formatting can be slightly better in Crystal - oh yes, and the graphs work

Also, crystal reports can be shared without the need for the other user(s) to have ACCESS on their machine.

I have both set up here and tend to only use the ACCESS tool though.

 

[boblarson]

One other good thing that Crystal can do that Access can't is to create custom groupings for displaying data in a way that isn't inherent in the way Access groups.

In other words, let's say that I have a region named "West" that contain 12 states and another called "East" that contains 14 states and then I have a couple others but they don't fall into our East or West breakdown. In Crystal, I can define East and West and then tell Crystal to either include the others as "other," as a different defined name, or just drop them. A very useful feature sometimes.

There's some other things as well. When building a report in Crystal, you can just drag and drop a text box into place and then do concatenation using fields and text you type in and it will do it all (including TRIM leading and trailing spaces) without having to code it. Just use drag and drop and typing. I LOVE that part.

Good luck!

 

[Opengrave]

Apples and Oranges. Crystal is a full featured robust tool designed specifically for reporting. Access doesn't have near the functionality but is a bit easier to use. For really heavy duty report generation Crystal wins hands down. For ad-hoc simple reports access is probably the better choice. The real question is how many reports will there be, how complicated will they be, are they distributed, etc... Is this something that will be used by two people skilled in both tools or will these reports be created by many users? Most folks can figure out Access reports but Crystal can be a bit intimidating to a novice user.

Crystal's 'drill down' feature is something I really wish Access had.