After struggling with VB6's built-in report generator, then a brief and frustrating fling with Crystal, I discovered Active Reports. It integrates seamlessly with VB6 and exposes events behind the report so that you can control the formatting programmatically. The dlls build straight into the VB distribution package (more than could be said for the version of Crystal I was using) so installation on client machines was simple. Best of all it has an excellent import wizard to convert reports from MS Access, so all my previous work in Access could be converted without the need to redesign all the reports. I don't know why this product isn't more widely known - it is brilliant. The price is also very good - once you've paid for a single developer licence you can distribute the user dlls to as many users as you like. I haven't tried the .NET product yet but if it's as good, I'll be trying to persuade my employers to buy it to use instead of the Crystal Reports that ships with VB.NET.

We have used ActiveReports 1 in our products for a few years now. We distribute very complex reports with our products and had many problems with unpredictable spatial layouts, page breaking, and Windows 98 installations. We were, however, after considerable investment in time and effort, able to figure out acceptable work-arounds. After upgrading our reports to ActiveReports 2, all previous problems were magnified. Reports that previously worked under AR1 now had new spatial layout and page break anomalies. Random installations on Windows 98 systems continued to fail with same "Runtime 6, Overflow" error that Data Dyanamics has been unable to resolve. After a few weeks of trying unsuccessfully to fix these issues, and no constructive support from DataDynamics, resulting in a delay of a significant upgrade of our product, we have decided to revert back to AR1 and look at new reporting software options for future releases. Simple reporting is fine, but if you are doing very complex layout reports, I cannot recommend this product. We have been fighting it's unpredictable layout problems for far too long and it is no longer worth the investment. I have been a big proponent of ActiveReports in the past, but the current headaches are just not worth the effort. A product upgrade should never break existing applications. Very disappointing.

Complete, functional, powerful, easy, simple and reliable. It work's without any problems, Great!

I had tested other programms, but I chose the ActiveReport 2.0 A very functional and easy to use program. Perfect in Visual Basic 6 projects. Installation and compilation and distribution without any problems. Tip: to use this component in Windows, without Office 2000 installation, you must install a different Microsoft component Jet40Sp3_Comp.exe to use an MSAccess 2000 MDB databank with this component. Very good documentation and help.