On Monday 06 July 2009 09:29:09 am Dan Means wrote:

> but a nice generic Crystal type app would be ideal.

Maybe I'm just getting old but I hated Crystal. Way over the top. After

spending hundreds of dollars and maybe hundred hours setting up drill down

etc. I never had a client that ever said "wow" or even anything close. I

even asked a major client if they enjoyed the click and drill down. I got "I

don't use it".

My clients do not care about all that can be done with crystal. So I gave up

and just used Fox. And the same goes for foxfire, stonefield and others. I

show them how to create reports and two month later I watch as they use Excel

to create a new report.

And today I'm presented with the same situation. Yea, I could use something

other than ReportDesigner and reportWriter. But why?

Larry has been able to do everything the clients want so far. Sure there are

issues but nothing is a deal breaker (Thanks to Paul). At the moment we have

email (converted PDF to text and attachment of PDF), Fax, printing, and

review. We will soon have SMS text messages too.

The only thing I'd like to see is better tools to create reports. I had to

create a small app to generate test data for the XML's. Also the

ReportDesigner is not always stable.