Crystal Reports 2008 - Reviews
by Business Objects (formerly Crystal Decisions) - Product Type: Component / ActiveX OCX / DLL / VBX / VCL / VC++ Class Library
Customer Reviews
Average Review: 
based on 12 reviews.
scott [USA] 14-Apr-2006Review: 
Overall this is a complete reporting package, but I wouldn't recommend it if you need to deploy your application to endusers (like a shrink wrapped package). The deployment is HUGE and bloated our install by almost 35 mb, and there is no help from CR about paring down the size. It is very full featured, and we've yet to run into a report you couldn't create (with a little creativity sometimes) but it appears to be geared more towards corporations and endusers than developers.
Support is pretty good, we received 2 support incidents with purchase, used one, and they were helpful (although they often just send you links to articles in their knowledgebase, you have to pester them to actually look at your trouble). The knowledgbase is decent, but v11 is new and not much was included that was relevant to that version. All in all, if I were developing applications for commercial distribution - or any type of distribution where I had to include the entire reporting engine and not just the report files - I'd definitely go with something else. If you know that your userbase has CR installed (i.e. a corporate environment) then perhaps it's worth it.
steve.sharkey [United Kingdom] 15-Mar-2005Review: 
Thought I would try to give a fair review of this product. Many people were introduced to Crystal reports as it was originally bundled with vb (I'm refering to version 4 not the .NET version) and so like many other components it seemed logical to upgrade and stick with what you know rather than try anything else.
Many of the reviews here are very old and refer to old versions - we currently use v9 and yet v11 is now out. Whilst the newer versions have answered some peoples critisisms they obviously don't affect the star rating so I hope people looking for tools will take not of the dates that reviews were posted (in my opinion reviews should have a mandatory version number for the software that is being reviewed).
Although the product doesn't integrate as completely as we'd like with VB we understand that as a product used by people other than VB developers this may always be the case. We've never had the terrible crashing problems reported here and have been able to produce just about any report we wanted to (SQL Server 2000 & Access data providers). I will admit that on occaisions we have to be quite innovative in our thinking to get some more advanced results but that's part of what keeps me in I.T.
I can't comment on their customer support I have never needed to contact them.
drmarkoflynn [United Kingdom] 16-Jan-2005Review: 
Simply this is the worst tool you could ever ever buy, beeing used to the crystal reports of old we purchased this, now I wish I had just flushed the money down the sink, forced to give one star for ratings, this is by far ten more than it should get, I dream of vendors removing this tool from their lists. If you need a reporting, printing tool go to another product, ANY OTHER PRODUCT, it will be better.
davidw [United Kingdom] 21-Jan-2003Review:
Confirming that the On Screen Print Button with Crystal Reports Dot Net, does not work within the 98 Windows series. So you must write you own.
This is a known fault in Crystal Reports and has been known since September 2002.
This is not likely to be fixed, so recommend you use alternative 3rd Party Print Tools for the Dot Net development.
The Work around suggested by Crystal is at best substandard and not worth pursuing.
Please advice other programmers of this limitation.
blyakhman [USA] 16-Oct-2002Review:
I'm working with CR for about 3 months now. And about two weeks ago I hit my personal record - I crashed VS.NET 13 times. Can you belive it? - 13 times! CR punishes you for every wrong move you make.
Also their license policy is not very cost effective at best. If you need to support more than 5 concurrent clients, You would wish you went for another product....
andyb [United Kingdom] 11-Apr-2002Review:
An expensive and complex component, but there is no evaluation version available. That is very poor. Given the poor reviews and the fact that I cannot personally evaluate Crystal Reports without paying the full price, I shall be looking elsewhere for a reporting tool.
Oldshoes 12-Mar-2002Review:
Thousands of pages of documentation, no simple examples. I tried Crystal together with the Data Environment Designer and SQL-server, but nothing that can be satisfying. I don't understand...
Jay [USA] 15-Aug-2001Review:
As a free component with VB, it does the job. I have recently been doing a lot of Visual InterDev development and wanted to include the same reporting functionality via the WEB as with VB client/server applications. After talking with Crystal Decisions about the WEB licensing, it was revealed that you only get 5 WEB user licenses with the developer edition. Crystal Decisions monitors, controls and locks out users when the licensing is exceeded. If you go to their website and look at how much this will cost you for their WEB licensing structure, you will find that it is very expensive.
sandra [Canada] 20-Jul-2001Review:
I have tried to use Crystal Reports to develop reports from a SQL database. Quite frankly, I think the program and the documentation are not good enough! It is almost impossible to do anything but the most basic task.
Anonymous 18-May-2001Review: 
Crystal Reports works great for SQL Sever 7 stored procedures. Our company has a host of reports all driven by SQL Server stored procedures. What it does not work with is Oracle stored procedures.
Anonymous 14-May-2001Review:
I find this product to be a very hard to use. Documentation is outdated and does not provide simple and straight forward examples.
jjackson [MO, USA] 11-May-2001Review:
We are using VB 6 and the Data Environment to connect to a SQL Server with stored procedures. Having completed the program, we decided that Crystal Reports would be an easy way to generate a simple report... wrong!
If you are trying to generate a crystal report from a SQL Server stored procedure (by passing a parameter) through the VB Data Environment... forget it. It won't work. We have been working with Crystal Reports technical support for over 30 days and they have been unable to help us.
I'm not saying that this is a bad product, but it certainly does not work well with stored procedures!
