Seagate Crystal Reports V8 Developer Edition 5 user

As is often the case with enterprise applications, this product consists of two separate products. The core package, Crystal Reports 8 Developer, is for accessing the contents of database tables and generating reports based on their contents. The wizards make it easy to specify which fields should serve as headers and simplify the process of doing calculations on extracted values. In a report on the monthly sales of a multinational chain of stores, for example, you could group individual stores' sales figures by country and calculate total sales figures for each country and for the chain as a whole. Wizards also handle formatting, so it's pretty easy to get neat-looking reports customised with your organisational logo. Wizards aren't limited to tabular reports: you can use them to generate reports that reveal details in response to clicks (so-called "drill-down" reports) and personalised form letters for mass mailings.

Going beyond the wizards, Crystal Reports offers a tool for visually creating joins among tables (by which you can consolidate the fields in multiple tables into a single report). It also simplifies the building of SQL queries-the tool that lets you find the maximum value in a field across many records or perform complicated text-searches on the contents of text fields. Users will be delighted by the ease with which they can create reports to support their business decisions.

The other product in this package is Crystal Enterprise 8, which is capable of taking report documents from Crystal Reports and distilling them into publications that it then serves to network users. There are several ways to go about preparing reports for network publication, the simplest being nearly automatic conversion of Crystal Reports documents into Dynamic HTML (DHTML) files that standard Web browsers can read. With a little more work, Crystal Enterprise will serve reports in streaming form--meaning they're updated dynamically as their underlying data changes. It'll also generate Adobe Acrobat (.PDF) files, as well as reports delimited by Extensible Markup Language (XML) tags. The XML feature is especially good, because it means you can use Crystal Enterprise as an engine for generating business documents that are fed to business partners via an XML-based information-exchange system, such as Microsoft BizTalk Server.

Because it's easy-to-use and flexible in its output, Crystal Reports 8 Developer Edition belongs in the toolkit of anyone who's responsible for sharing complicated information--especially numerical information--with others via a network. --David Wall

There are also report types (subreports, conditional, summary, cross-tabs, form, drill down, OLAP, top N, multiple details, mailing labels), hyperlinks, charting, mapping, parameters, alerts, Add-ins for Excel and Access, sorting, running totals, grouping, top N, bottom N, image format support, formula editor, Experts and more. The programs also provides drivers and support for more than 30 SQL-, ODBC-, OLE DB- and PC-based data sources, including XML.