Crystal is the Bane of My Existence

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I hate Crystal Reports.

Well, to be fair I’ve never had to actually use the designer to create a report.  I’ve mainly been on projects where it was used and saw that it was a general pain to those closer to it.  But now, this is just one more reason to really hate the product.  Business Objects (the company selling this product) has now become greedy at Ludicrous Speed!

This is just plain stupid.  How in the world is this cost effective compared to SQL Reporting Services or Active Reports?  Sure, Active Reports may not have an Enterprise Scheduler system out of the box to challenge Crystal Enterprise, but it would take me about three to four weeks to come up with one (or maybe less since I’ve done it before).  With what I get paid I sure as hell know it will be cheaper!  SQL Reporting Services already has this built in, again, CHEAPER. 

This is the third time I’ve had just be in awe over the stupidity of that company….and the first two times were before they were bought up by Business Objects.

  • The article above and their licensing scheme.
  • I was on a big .Net project before .Net was publicly released.  We were looking at using Crystal Reports to use as the report generator since they were going to bundle with VS.Net when it came out.  Even though my project was being run by MICROSOFT and we had access to the .Net Product Team if we needed them (MCS saw the project as that important) Crystal didn’t want to help us because they would not support a product that hadn’t been released.  Microsoft reps even asked them and they said no.  Well, chalk one up to Active Reports, which got installed for that application.
  • A client wanted to install Crystal Reports and have it generate reports for viewing on a web application.  Since this would be exposed to the Internet the cost tag for Crystal was going to be $5,000 MORE than the cost of the server, software, and the SQL Server license put together.  Chalk another one up for Active Reports.

It is my hope that MS SQL Reporting Services, Active Reports, and other reporting tools drown Crystal Reports by providing the same capabilities at fractions of the cost.  Let’s face it, just what does Crystal do that these others tools can’t?  I’d say the reporting capabilities in either SQL Reporting or Active reports is just fine for about 95% of people who need to generate and display reports.  And they don’t charge for sending the things in email!  If software companies start charging for things like this then before you know it you won’t be able to send an email with Outlook without having a Email Distribution License.