SAP Crystal Reports Reviews

I use all the features and there is nothing that is more important than the other.

We have a tool to generate all reports for all internal customers. We have different layouts for over 200 reports that change a lot, based on the tool. It is very important to keep everything beautiful and organized.

We are using an old version, and the only thing isn't good is that some error messages are not specific and it is sometimes hard to find the error.

I've been using it for four years day to day, but I first used it eight years ago.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

When I started with my current company, they were already using the solution.

I just have just one situation that I am afraid to update the Crystal Reports DLL version in production to get some features . I do not feel confident to update it even though I have a guarantee that everything will work fine.

Ease of extracting data from various sources and displaying in such a way that user can’t tell the difference.

Largely used by stores manages and senior management to view / analyze sales metrics.

I would like to see a mobile and iOS friendly version.

I have used Crystal Reports for approximately 15 years, and in my current company for eight years.

There some issues with the deployment.

We have had minor issues with its stability.

It's been difficult to scale for our needs.

6/10

It was straightforward in terms of installation, development and deployment.

We’re implementing it through CMC and have an in-house application that pulls the report from CMC.

Versatility between platforms.

It is a pillar of our product to provide embedded reports so I would say it has been an essential part of our system.

They need to offer better support to clients and have a better knowledge base.

I've been using it for 12 years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Terrible, if it wasn’t for the Google community there would not be any support at all.

It was already part of Visual Studio. Later on we bought the developer edition and the installation was very simple.

We used both and try to always work with someone of infrastructure because there is a tendency to have problems with permissions on the latest Windows Server OS.

It came embedded with Visual Studio. Now there is SSRS.

Be aware that SAP Crystal Reports support is practically none existent so be aware that you will need to gather information from other sources.

I value it's ability to satisfy most demanding reporting requirements with ease. No complex programming or tweaking of properties. It can be learned by a power user to satisfy their analytical needs without IT support and, the expert developer can deliver advanced functionality with ease. Mature and works as expected.

Like any tool, the value is derived by how the users use it. I have worked in many organizations and the usage differs, the following are the most value additions I have come across.

• Third party logistics - monitoring their KPIs and highlighting exceptions. 
• Marketing services - generating and emailing thousands of routine reports to it's customers with Crystal Enterprise
• Healthcare industry (Software as a Service) - manage huge report portfolio with a relatively small development team.

The functionality is not evolving much over newer releases. The limitation of the original row based model is still there, and there's no easy way to draw tables. I would very much like to see full multi-dimensional reporting capability. The primitive capabilities have not been improved over the last 10 years.

There were some no issues with the deployment.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

It was very good, but now the competition is overtaking, and SAP seems to use it as a cash cow.

It’s ability to connect to multiple data sources, use SQL or individual tables, views or stored procedures, data formatting options, ability to handle and display various date formats and the ability to use VB or Crystal Syntax (or both) within a report.

We were able to develop several On-Time Performance reports to assist with correcting scheduling errors and/or location errors for our buses. This has allowed us to get a much more accurate picture of where we are and how to get where we want to be.

Charts and Graphs are the only reason I don’t give the product a 10/10. Microsoft Excel is far better and Tableau is even better than that. So much so that my company now wants us to start using Tableau as a replacement for Crystal Reports, at least where graphs and charts are concerned.

I’ve used it for 18 years.

When upgrading versions of Microsoft Windows, Crystal Reports would not always work correctly. We would have to reinstall it to make it work right.

With Windows 10, our Crystal Reports XI product stopped working correctly completely, but works fine when we upgrade them to Crystal Reports 2013.

It has been able to scale for our needs.

We have not used any support from SAP that I am aware of.

Fairly straightforward, especially with 2013. With XI, some options were not checked that we needed. With 2013, they are.

We did the initial setup in-house. Make sure you have detailed step-by-step installation instructions if having a team installing it so everyone gets the exact same setup and things don’t get missed. We had that problem early on when upgrading to 2013 from XI and I had to help determine what was missed or done wrong so they could do it correctly.

The licensing is currently $500 per copy, so we are trying to limit the number of licenses we have to keep costs down.

I do not know. It was already being used corporate wide when I arrived.

Make sure you have at least one person (preferable two), who know how to use the product before implementing it corporate wide. The problem at my company is there are 100 licenses out there and we have only 1 person who is an SME (Subject Matter Expert): Me. Everyone else uses it, but they have not had any real training or don’t use it full time.

It is easy to use and it connects to the major databases.

It provides trusted business information for decisions and operations management.

The sales, operations, and IT areas could use improvement.

I have been using Crystal Reports for 20 years, since 1997.

I have had no major issues with deployment.

I have had no issues with the stability.

This is a simple but powerful reporting tool. I don’t have scalability issues for more than 100 users.

I would give customer service a rating of 4.5/5.

Technical support is good. I would give technical support a rating of 4.5/5.

I used Excel, but that was a long time ago when the BI tools were very basic.

I have implemented both with a vendor team and in-house. My level is expert.

The ROI depends on your use. In the first implementation, it was very productive with sales increases and time reduction.

Today, I only use a standalone license.

If you are looking for a cheap operational tool, the Crystal Reports family is the correct decision.

Performance

Drill-down reporting functionality

Report wizard

Variable

Built in Formulas

Presentation Options like Charts, Cross tab reports etc.

We develop many management reports using Crystal Reports. It has reduced the development cost, effort, and provides feature rich reports.

Support of crystal report is also very good, in terms compatibility, many vendors preferred crystal reports as preferred report delivery product.

It needs better support for child reports.

It needs additional formulas.

some performance issues when joining tables using report wizard.

I've been using SAP Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 for four years.

We had no issues with the deployment. deployment is smooth and it depends upon how you are going to deploy, as dll or rpt file.

There have been no stability issues.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Customer service is good, and responses come within an acceptable time.

Technical support is good, and responses come within an acceptable time.

We previously used SQL Server reporting services. These are also good but complex in some scenarios, like child reports.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

ROI is great as we are using the VS 2010 version which is free with Visual Studio.

Study your requirements carefully, map them into this product, and if you think it fulfills the requirements, you should go for it.

I appreciate the ability to connect to just about any structured data source. This makes it very flexible. We can use it in any Windows-based technical environment, but now we specialize with reports for just one data source, QuickBooks via QQube. Since we have Crystal Reports viewers available for our customers to use, they don't need to purchase the product, but can run the reports that we build for them.

We use it as a tool to build custom designed reports that our customers can run at a single click against their own data. It's the foundation of our company's existence.

We would like to see a Crystal Reports desktop version with built-in functionality to edit a single reference that exists in multiple formulas. This would be a big time saver. We would also like to select multiple detail area fields and insert the same summary field for all of them instead of having to do it one at a time.

We have used it for 20 years.

We haven't had deployment issue per se, as much as part of a greater stability worry.

It's always been known to crash unexpectedly, so get in the habit of frequent saving. I never liked the auto-save feature, though because it ends up saving things I didn't intend to retain. Since version 2008 it's been much more stable.

We have never encountered scalability issues.

I never use it because those folks don't even know as much about it as I do. However, if I encounter a bug, I will go to the SAP SDN to check it out or to report it.

No other solution has been used. I've been working with it since I worked in Tech Support for Seagate Software when they owned and supported the application.

It was simple and easy to install. The hard part was knowing/learning the structure of your data source and what you want to do with that data. Like any skill, it takes a long time to master. I have done incredible, innovative things with Crystal Reports, but only because I knew it so well and could synthesize breakthrough ideas on how to give the customer what they wanted.

Hire experts for a fixed period of time while longer term employees shadow until they learn how to use it. Otherwise a new reporting endeavour will take too long. The end users need their reports.

The ability to connect to most databases, be it Lawson, PeopleSoft, Excel or Access and that is only to name a few. The customization for clients is the absolute favorite feature, not to mention that I can do more formulas and bring in more data than most other reporting software that I have used. This includes using and tying in multiple databases.

With the reports I have created, mostly financial, it gives the business owners an easy way to see how their money is being spent, where it's going to and to see if they are remaining on budget and if not to adjust how they spend throughout the rest of the year. This alone is the single most important factor but not the only one. My clients use my reports for Inventory Control, Payroll and Human Resources purposes as well. All these reports can save a company lots of money if they are used as they are supposed to be.

I think the product is great and has so much now but I have noticed that it is not Excel 10 compatible and when the reports are extracted to XLS it defaults to MS Office version 95-97 which has dropped rows of data from sheet to sheet. I would like to see the ability to use the most current versions of MS Office.

I have used Crystal Reports for approximately 15 years starting with CR Developer 8.

There were no issues with the deployment.

Nothing that minor adjustments in the report developer did not fix. Once I had made the adjustments in CR Developer there was no issue in LBI which is where I deploy 90% of my reports to.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Customer service was great I had a couple questions and they walked me thru it quick and easy.

The two times I have called support for the product have been very pleasant. The technical support person was very friendly, knowledgeable and knew how to fix my issue immediately. The second time I called I was on hold for about 17-20 minutes but again the person on the other end was very cordial and knew exactly how to fix my issue.

I have used numerous report writers in the past and by far Crystal Reports is the best. The user friendliness and versatility to create custom reports and designs to fit my customers needs has been a real useful business tool.

Initial set up was straightforward. You got instructions on how to install Crystal, how to set up your ODBC connections and the Oracle 10g client, which is what my business uses. There were no problems with the install on any of the PC's or desktops within the organization.

We did the install in-house. The only advice that I can give is to follow the instructions given they are literally fool proof and very straightforward. I would recommend that the Oracle Client, if that is what you are using, be installed first, then install Crystal Reports. Other than that there was no issues.

We are a large organization so we called and arranged a package of 25+ licenses at a real good rate. We paid for the product once then the additional licenses for the personal that would be using the software on a daily basis not to mention the license we had to have for LBI. We had gotten a great deal and I recommend that if you need more than one license to buy it. We have a few extra just in case, you never know when you will be adding another person who would need Crystal Reports.

I did not evaluate any other products but have used Report Smith, Lawson Report Writer and MS SQL Developer in the past and have found that Crystal Reports has more versatility, is easier to use, and meets the needs of my clients and organization better.

If your company has a reporting need which almost all do, then I would highly recommend Crystal Reports. I use the product so much in the past 15 years that I ended up becoming a CRCP as well.

It can gather data from many sources and consolidate that data.

It is easy to get quick results, but also allows you to create more in-depth reports.

It contains a relational database that allows you to join tables from different tables in the same report.

It can export to Excel, text files, or PDF and many other formats.

A non-IT person can create some reports, and an IT person can take it much further.

If you have Crystal Reports, it can import Excel files that were made in Excel 2003, files with a .xls file extension and file format. It does not yet recognize files with a .xlsx file extension, which would be from Excel 2007, 2010, 2013 or 2016. With Access files, Crystal Reports can import databases with a .mdb format, but not the newer format if .accdb.

This was true as of Crystal Reports 2013. They may have changed it since
then.

I have used it with several clients to create complex reports that required multiple data sources and complex relationships.

They need to make it work with new file formats for Excel and Access. It also needs to be more compatible with other data sources.

I have been using Crystal Reports for over 10 years, and this version for about two years.

I have seen integration with SAP , and it seems pretty seamless. There are versions of Crystal Reports that come embedded with other software programs, like Peachtree, etc. I would recommend that you upgrade to the full version so you can take advantage of some of the features.

I've experienced no issues with performance.

I have the single user edition.

Their support is top notch, although you may have to pay for it.

I created many reports using Access. Crystal reports is similar, but more robust.

I have the single user version, and had no problems.

I installed it myself.

It's a great product that works with many data sources. I highly recommend it.