Crystal Reports XI allows you to access, format, and deliver information to drive better decisionmaking with the flexibility and power necessary to provide your internal and external users with the information they need, when they need it, while minimizing IT overhead.
Platform Support: PC
Crystal Reports XI Developer Accessories
Crystal Reports XI: The Complete Reference (Complete Reference Series)
Crystal Reports XI Official Guide (Business Objects Press)
Crystal Reports XI for Developers
Microsoft SQL Server Developer Edition 2005 CD/DVD
Crystal Reports Encyclopedia Volume 1: Professional XI Reports
Special Edition Using Business Objects Crystal Reports XI (Special Edition Using)
Crystal Reports XI Professional Edition
Crystal Reports: A Beginner's Guide
Professional Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET, 2nd Edition
Crystal Reports .NET Programming
Crystal Reports XI Developer Reviews
Crystal Reports XI is a powerful package, but it has a fussy, buggy user interface with abitrary behaviors. For example, attempts to do fine layout adjustments are tedious and a small adjustment to axis label font size changes the chart length, which begins a length round of small changes, each affecting some other layout aspect. You might expect that a program has been around as long as Crystal Reports would be very stable and easy to work with as there has been plenty of time to refine it. It is kind of like a puzzle game. This is a difficult program to deal with if you want to do much more than vanilla, tabular reporting with very simple charting. Specific example, the connector line between points on a line chart will remain the default color. Perhaps Crystal has reached that point its age is working against it.
I have spent hours laying out two charts.
Plan to spend a fair amount of time guessing the exact input it is waiting for.
XI provides the apparent ability to change chart object colorsthere is a menubut the changes do not take.
Try to avoid fine crafting, or plan to spend 2-3 times the time you originally estimated to get it right.
However, the nature of complex software is that it tends not to age well.
Update Feb 27, 2008 - I have been preparing charts with CR XI now and I must say, the program is tear-your-hair fussy to work with.
Once you discover the tricks it works well, though.
This is a very powerful tool and will pay for itself in time saved and customer satisfaction. Now you can choose whether to use the Crystal Reports programming language or Basic programming language. It was easy to create and integrate the reports into my existing database programs I created with Microsoft Visual Studio. The exported reports are improved over the previous version and it now includes Adobe Acrobat, along with Excel, HTML, Word, RTF, and text. There is an extensive library of functions to use in producing professional looking and useful reports. I was using Crystal Reports 7 and upgraded to this version.
