What is your reporting tool of choice? [closed]

Answer 1

1) I would think Reporting Services is very good for most of the needs, when in comes to developing table based reports and also matrix reports (drilldown - pivot like functionality).Considering the price of Cognos etc. An SME can't even dream of getting Congns AFAIK

2) Report Scheduling / Subscription functionality can be invoked to send reports to a set of users (data driven) to deliver reports. Subscriptions can be delivered to custom locations such as an SFTP, by writing .Net code.

3) Using Report Models, end user can drag and drop columns and develop customized reports

To Note:

1) It can get trickier once you develop really complex graphical/dashboard kind reports - which involve few charts and small tables to be displayed in A4. Report Designer (the tool we use to design reports) and Web display use different rendering engines. So it is better if you deploy the reports often and see how they look, if you develop complex graphical reports

2) If you write custom functionality, you may have to change the XML configuration files(RSReportServer.Config etc). If there is any problem in the edit, ReportServer service may stop. So be careful to back up before doing anything custom

Answer 2

I've used Reporting Services and Crystal fairly extensively, and I'm writing a few reports using Excel(ick) at the moment.

Reporting Services is pretty good for simple reports but as soon as you need total control over formatting,complex formulas and charts etc. Crystal is a long way ahead. I also find Crystal to be far more usable; being able to change things within the report preview is invaluable (it may be possible in later versions of RS?).

RS also needs to be deployed to a web server which limits it's usefulness if you are writing applications that need to be deployed externally.

Older versions of Crystal were very buggy but the latest ones are much better, it's much more mature than Reporting Services.

Answer 3

For simple reports I use the standard ReportViewer included in Visual Studio.

For more complicated reports and ones that require more performance I've used both Report Sharp Shooter and devExpress XtraReports. Surprisingly, in both products creating tables isn't as easy as it should but both are faster than ReportViewer and handle extremely well multi-column reports, barcodes and aggregate data.

Answer 4

For knocking out fairly "run of the mill" reports, SQL Reporting Services is really quite impressive.

For complicated analysis, loading the data (maybe pre-aggregated) into an Excel Pivot table is usually adequate for most users.

I've found you can spend a lot of time (and money) building a comprehensive "ad-hoc" reporting suite and after the first month or two of "wow factor", 99% of the reports generated will be the same report with minor differences in a fixed set of parameters.

Don't accept when a user says they want "ad-hoc" reports without specifying what goals and targets their looking for. They are just fishing and they need to actually spend as much time on THINKING about THEIR reporting requirements as YOU would have to spend BUILDING their solution.

I've spent too much time building the "the system that can report everything" and for it to become out of date or out of favour before it was finished. Much better to get the quick wins out of the way as quick as possible and then spend time "systemising" the most important reports.

Answer 5

For a lot of projects we use ActiveReports.

Answer 6

Crystal Reports, because it is easy to take the same exact report file and

1 - Post it on the intranet

2 - Embed it in an application

3 - Schedule it to be emailed as an Excel output every so often to whoever needs it

Also (as I already suggested), it exports easily to Excel, PDF, and other formats.