How To Overcome Crystal Reports' Shortcomings

Crystal Reports has been a popular report generator. But, due to the inherent shortcoming of its architectural design, Crystal Reports have suffered some important limitations. Here, we will identify the major limitations of Crystal Reports, and provide the solutions.

Drawback 1: Inflexible - Crystal Reports is not very flexible. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to use Crystal Reports to create complex reports.

Drawback 2: Unable to Modify Generated Reports - Once you use Crystal Reports to generate reports at runtime, you do not have the option to allow your users to edit and/or modify the reports.

Drawback 3: Incapable of Technical Drawings - You can not create and include sophisticated technical drawings in your text-based reports created by Crystal Reports.

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Consequence of the Crystal Report Drawbacks

Because of the above Crystal Reports limitations, you can not use Crystal Reports to do some reporting and printing tasks such as:
----Produce text or graphics reports
----Produce reports with technical drawings
----Embed charts, diagrams or graphs in reports
----Perform for publication automation
----Visually fill out pre-printed forms such as bank checks, air flight tickets, medical bills, state and federal government forms etc.
----Print VB forms, etc.
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Solutions

The above Crystal Report limitations can not be solved within the Crystal Reports architecture itself. There are other component-based tools (such as ViewPro from HexaTech) that can help you to solve these Crystal Reports limitations.You may click here to download a ViewPro demo/trial program, which shows how the above Crystal Reports limitations have been overcomed.
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