Features and Benefits of Crystal Reports

Features and Benefits of Crystal Reports

Features of Crystal Reports

Report Designer

It enables the users to design the data connections graphically and report its layout. The users can also choose and link the tables from a wide variety of data sources like Oracle databases, Microsoft Access databases, Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets and much more. Reporters can place various fields from any above-mentioned resources on report design surface to implement them in custom formulas. Then it can be placed on the design surface. Evaluation of the formula can be done at several stages while generating the report as specified by the developer.

There are many options available for formatting fields and formulas in crystal reporting. This can be used by report developers conditionally or absolutely. The user can group the data into bands and then split it further as per requirement. It also has support for graphing, subreports and a limited amount of GIS operations.

Central Management Server

The main server that operates BusinessObjects XI is the Central Management Server (CMS) formerly known as Crystal Management Server.

Supported Data sources

It supports the following data sources:

• XML files
• text files
• databases like IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Interbase, Informix, Salesforce, PostgreSQL, Sybase and etc.
• APIs like OLE DB and ODBC
• Spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel
• Groupware applications like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise

Possible Target Audience

Prior to 2010, crystal reports are integrated with Visual Studio. Crystal reports introduce various products in the market and are continuously competing with them to own the market. Some of them are ActiveReports, SQL Server Reporting Services and XtraReports. Crystal Reports can be made run outside the environment of Microsoft. This will help the Java developers to build applications by using the components of Crystal Reports.

Benefits of using Crystal Reports

Flexible and Customised report

• It enables the user to create highly formatted, pixel-perfect reports quickly.

Powerful report delivery options

• It enables the user to deliver personised reports to the customer in language and format they want to get it.

Data source connectivity

• It enables the users to directly connect data sources including Native, ODBC, OLE DB, OLAP, web services, XML and more.

Expanded support for Excel

• It enables the delegates to take full advantage of the Excel file format by exporting multiple data into the single worksheet.

Windows Operating system compatibility

• It provides reasonable compatibility with Windows 7.

Mobile Compatibility

• It enables the users to open interactive reports through the mobile devices.

SAP Crystal Reports, Adobe Flash and HTML 5 integration

• It enables the reporters to produce “mash-ups” by pulling data from various data sources.

Competitors

• Due to its popularity, it has great competition in the market with products like SQL Server Reporting services, Active Reports, List and Label and more.