Although ActiveReports integrates into the .NET environment, I found it extremely fiddly to set up. The process of adding a report to your project and getting it to work for the first time is a lengthy process. What I found most dissapointing about ActiveReports is that it only seems to be good at handling textual data. When you add a field to a report it adds it as a text field, rather than looking at the actual type in the database. For example, I needed to write a report to output images from a database - something which is very easy with Crystal Reports. After emailing DataDynamics support, it became apparent that this cannot be done without writing lots of code to read the images from the database and then assign them to picture controls on the report. I wasn't sure exactly how to do this so I asked support for an example, but they told me that they did not have a sample program so would not be able to provide me with an example. They did provide me with a report to display a single image read from a file, but this was very different to my requirement.