Ins and Outs of Crystal 2008 in Access 2007?

[CoastalData]

Hello, I have a customer who's reporting needs seem to have exceeded the capabilities of the built-in reports in MS Access 2007, and so I'm debating the possibility of creating those reports with Crystal.

Their Access database is split, with the front end residing locally, and the back end on a centralized server.

I haven't played with Crystal in many many years, and back then I was horrified at the amount of extra work involved, but I'm hoping that the newest version is better.

Could somebody please give me some pointers on what to expect, and whether maybe I'm looking in the wrong direction?

Thanks in advance, I appreciate your help!

 

[boblarson]

If you don't know Crystal Reports, you really need training on it to get the most out of it. It is a very easy program to use and does wonderful things. BUT, and this is the big BUT - it is not intuitive. It is hard to uncover things yourself. I pride myself on figuring things out but when I started with Crystal Reports it was a pain trying to figure it out. I managed to get sent to both Basic and Advanced training on it and it made a HUGE difference.

 

[CoastalData]

Hmmm, that's not entirely encouraging! LOL

I do have a lot more training and experience with Visual Studio these days, will that help, or is it still completely dissimilar?

Know of any other solutions which would allow me to produce good advanced reports?

What I'm trying to do is to produce filtered reports across financial data that will allow me to sum across multiple accounts and on multiple criteria, such as reconciled vs. not reconciled, etc., as well as by date range.

 

[boblarson]

Well, this might help you:

http://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Repor...bs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234900798&sr=8-1

If you have worked with Crystal Reports in Visual Studio, that is one thing. Otherwise it is really its own thing and you need some sort of training, or book like the one above.

As for the type of reports you mentioned, I believe you can still do that in Access as you can do some very complex reporting in Access as well. Of course, if I had the choice between Access and Crystal Reports for reporting, I would choose CR any day. I love it myself and find it way easier to create reports in (but then again I've had training on it).

 

[CoastalData]

Well the problem with Access is that in order to provide the different types of information, I'm having to use hidden fields and DLookup()s, and this has two side effects, the first being that it is getting very slow, and the other is that those lookups have to be dynamically modified in order to produce the filtered results, and that REALLY is slowing things down.

Another problem I've always had in Access is trying to account for different printers installed at the customer locations, with margins varying from computer to computer.

I just ran the wizard in CR, and it produced... a horrible mess.

The interface looks so familiar, it feels like I'm in Access... I have a Safari account, so I should have access to many books, now that you mention it. Guess I'll have to see what I can do.