Re: Suggestions on Reporting Tools Please

[Quoted] I have to agree here. After the 4 day Crystal Report training class I was able to generate some complex reports with no problem. I have found it to be one of the easier report tools to work with. (Of course our PHB decided [Quoted] to do everything in Access 3 months after the whole department went to training but that is why there is an 80% turnover rate in his groups.) I have also seen a demo where Access was used to return very complex reports against an Oracle database with a stated (and met!) goal of no report taking [Quoted] longer than 30 seconds to execute. The crowd laughed at the very idea until [Quoted] we saw it done. There was a lot of up front setup involved and some very skillful design work (i.e. pass thru queries that were well tuned ) but it worked very well. I still don't like the idea of using access as a report tool since that is not its primary function but that's my own view. I really don't think you will find much out there that is easier than Crystal [Quoted] Reports if you can get at least one person trained. I don't know if they still do it but Seagate used to give away a free 50 seat license of their business intelligence software. Inside of one of the components was a full [Quoted] blown version of Crystal Reports. That might make it a wee bit easier to pry some training funds loose from management.

Daniel A. Morgan <dmorgan_at_exesolutions.com> wrote in message news:3ADBBB67.8449102A_at_exesolutions.com...
> > i have some users that need a GUI based, ODBC compliant reporting tool
 that
> > is easier to use than Crystal Reports but not as low level as MS Access.
> > any suggestions?
>
> Your requirements are so self-limiting it is hardly worth trying to help
 you.
> Why must it be ODBC compliant? Saying that excludes every single native
 Oracle
> reporting tool.
>
> And, quite frankly, if your users are so (I hate to say it) untrainable
 that
> they can't learn Crystal I doubt there is any tool they could learn to
 use.
> Crystal is mind numbingly easy unless you get into very complex reports.
>
> My personal suggestion would be Oracle's Discoverer, followed by Crystal
 and
> Cognos. But I suspect the best advice would be to hire a competent report
> writer and get the amateurs out of the business (they probably wouldn't
 create
> accurate reports anyway).
>
> Daniel A. Morgan
>
Received on Tue Apr 17 2001 - 15:55:52 CEST