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Rating: 
Summary: Not as good as shareware
Review: As indicated in other reviews, this product is horribly buggy. Its only consistency is that it is creatively inconsistent. A rating of 1 is too high.It's unfortunate that there is no similar competitive product available. Otherwise, this product would be yesterday's toast. Your report info is stored in a binary file. It's a nightmare in there. Plus, unexpected and inexplicable random corruption of the binary destroys a great deal of work. Back up often. Installation procedure: poor
Ease of use: poor
Intuitiveness: poor
Documentation: poor
Technical support: poor
Reliability: poor
Rating: 
Summary: Great But. . . .
Review: Crystal Reports 8.5 provides a lot of features for designing reports on top of a relational database system and as far as consumer-tier goes, it's a fine product. Charts are pretty easy to use, the macro language is fairly powerful (and intuitive), and it's very easy to lay out items on the report. There are several annoying problems with it:
1. During upgrade from a previous version, the installer removed the previous version, then complained it couldn't find a certain file needed to "prove" this was an upgrade. After reinstalling the previous version and repeating the process a couple of times, I found a workaround on the Seagate web site. Ugh... this shouldn't happen. 2. The table linker is nice, but it is more primative than the one in Microsoft Access. For example, if I'm joining three fields from table "foo" to table "bar," and I make one of those joins a "right join" then the others two parts of the table join should default to this. They don't and it errors out. I feel the tool could be easier to use. 3. On several occasios the query tool got hopelessly confused. It was often easier to write a custom view or macro query on SQL Server (or Oracle) than it was to use the reporting front end. The problem I have with this is it makes my particular installation harder to do because in addition to just shipping a standalone report, I have to ship a SQL query. I wish there were a way for me to reliably tell it "I KNOW what I'm doing... ust send the query as I've typed it to the database." 4. Occasionally when a query had problems with it and I attempted to preview the report, it would go into "infinite loop" mode. The only way out of this was to use Windows to "kill" the program. Quite frequently, I'd have crw32.exe just crash on its own when accessing a SQL database.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice for reporting, but has some really annoying bugs
Review: Crystal Reports 8.5 provides a lot of features for designing reports on top of a relational database system and as far as consumer-tier goes, it's a fine product. Charts are pretty easy to use, the macro language is fairly powerful (and intuitive), and it's very easy to lay out items on the report. There are several annoying problems with it:
1. During upgrade from a previous version, the installer removed the previous version, then complained it couldn't find a certain file needed to "prove" this was an upgrade. After reinstalling the previous version and repeating the process a couple of times, I found a workaround on the Seagate web site. Ugh... this shouldn't happen. 2. The table linker is nice, but it is more primative than the one in Microsoft Access. For example, if I'm joining three fields from table "foo" to table "bar," and I make one of those joins a "right join" then the others two parts of the table join should default to this. They don't and it errors out. I feel the tool could be easier to use. 3. On several occasios the query tool got hopelessly confused. It was often easier to write a custom view or macro query on SQL Server (or Oracle) than it was to use the reporting front end. The problem I have with this is it makes my particular installation harder to do because in addition to just shipping a standalone report, I have to ship a SQL query. I wish there were a way for me to reliably tell it "I KNOW what I'm doing... ust send the query as I've typed it to the database." 4. Occasionally when a query had problems with it and I attempted to preview the report, it would go into "infinite loop" mode. The only way out of this was to use Windows to "kill" the program. Quite frequently, I'd have crw32.exe just crash on its own when accessing a SQL database.
Rating:
Summary: Programmer's Nightmare
Review: I don't have the space to convey just how much production time is continually being lost to this abysmally bad product in our shop of senior developers. I could go on for days. Try a little experiment before buying it: go to the CrystalDecisions website and look at some of the most common errors reported. Basic stuff like INSTALLING the product, getting it ready to package up with an install application, pointing it to a DB through just about any connection technology. And it's all downhill from there. I still don't get why there isn't a better product out there yet.
Rating:
Summary: Great But. . . .
Review: Its great but you have to have the Crystal Reports Design Class I, II, -> V books to help you through it. Without these it is very time consuming and the only way to get these books is to attend the classes. They are not available for sale. As I just found out :-( (They do not come with this package as I had thought) 10-12-2001
Rating:
Summary: Not as good as shareware
Review: The program is full of holes and traps for the programmer. The new method of including the report in VB programs uses a lot of overhead and slows a VB program down if the number of reports is more then 4 or 5. Some necessary dependacy files are not included and it will not easly load onto computers not using the internet (a great many business computers). Crystal Software includes a 60 days support package that is not at all enough. Just visit the Crystal developer web site to view some of the problems. Save your money and use your older versions until they get it right.
Rating:
Summary: Programmers beware.
Review: The program is full of holes and traps for the programmer. The new method of including the report in VB programs uses a lot of overhead and slows a VB program down if the number of reports is more then 4 or 5. Some necessary dependacy files are not included and it will not easly load onto computers not using the internet (a great many business computers). Crystal Software includes a 60 days support package that is not at all enough. Just visit the Crystal developer web site to view some of the problems. Save your money and use your older versions until they get it right.
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