alternatives to crystal reports

does anyone know of any alternatives to crystal reports?I personally believe an Etch-A-Sketch is a valid alternative to Crystal Reports.

Try HTML web pages, MS Access, CSV files that can be imported into Excel, etc.

Here's a typical scenario I have to deal with: Crystal Reports is used to format data from a SQL Server stored procedure. The formatted report is then exported to Microsoft Excel (Crystal is lousy at exporting to Excel) and the Excel file is then E-mailed to the customer, who probably procedes to strip out all the formatting to put the file in a simple tabular format that they can actually use. The point is, it would be better just to pipe the data from the stored procedure directly to a CSV file which could easily be opened by Excel.

Find out how your users are actually going to USE the data, and you can probably find an alternative that will please everybody.

blindman|||going along with blindman's thoughts, I use the office web components from microsoft pretty extensively. There is a hithc though Microsoft has some licensing issues with them (everyone hitting the site must be licensed for microsoft office)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=BEB5D477-2100-4586-A13C-50E56F101720&displaylang=en|||I'd love to see Bill Gates' prenuptial agreement. Do you suppose his wife said "I do" or did she just click on "I accept"? One things for sure, they don't have an open-source marriage!|||What they really want is a bi-monthly/weekly report/presentation, so they dont really use the data themsleves, just for sales purposes......so a solution that would enable me to produce quality presentation reports would be ideal.........|||If your reports ar just into data presentation without using charts and graphs, try using Active Reports. Its interface and concept of reporting follows the reporting used in MS Access.|||Unfortuneately they require charts and graphs rather than raw tables of data........so I dont think this would be a viable option...i maybe wrong of course!|||I think an access data projects (ADP file) would suit your requirements. Crystal has some nifty features that Access reports do not, but I think Access' ease of use, compatibility, and simplicity of design makes it a good choice. You can embed MS Graph object into your reports. (OK, MS Graph stinks, but I don't know what other alternatives there are to MS Graph.)

Also, have you considered building web page interface that could server as an "Executive Information System"? Then your bigwigs could just browse to the information they want during presentations to get the latest numbers.

blindman|||Yeah, we have considered this but its way down the line yet but defineately in a possibility...........our data is stored in an SQL server database.will this effect anything?|||SQL Server should be capable of handling this. Access ADP files provide a nice, simple interface to SQL Server databases.

blindman|||Originally posted by achowe
does anyone know of any alternatives to crystal reports?

This is a high-end alternative to CRW:

http://www.brio.com/products/overview.html