Best approach for producing reports!!!

[Angelina]

Hi,

I am creating my first windows application using vb.net
and wanted some advice. What i want to achieve is produce
some simple reports in my standalone application that will
produce graphs etc, for the various data i have in my
database. i.e sales for a specific month.
The user should have the ability to change the criteria
and drill down/up to the required level of detail.

I dont know what the best approach is for this. i have
been told by a friend to use crystal reports.

What do u guys think?
How easy is this tool to use? is it GUI based or does it
require alot of coding (if so, what type of coding...SQL?).

Does this tool come with visual studio.net ro does it need
to be purchased separtly?

I appreciate any help u guys can provide me )
thx for your time.

 

[William Ryan]

Crystal is a great tool and is very easy to use. From my experience, a
person with no programming experience but enough savvy to generate Graphs
and formulas in something like Excel, can whip up professional grade reports
with about 2 hours of study. Now, Crystal is a very sophisticated tool and
certainly you can't learn to fully use it in a day, but you can get very
productive with it, very fast. It's the number one reporting tool for a
reason. It's implementation in VS.NEt as opposed to older versions leaves a
little to be desired as far as design time goes, but it's not a big deal at
all, and if you didn't use prior versions, you won't even notice it.

It comes bundled with VS.NET pro but it does have a licensing scheme so you
can't deploy it if it isn't registered, and there are some potential
licensing issues depending on the nubmer of users (which won't affect you in
most instances,unless you ahve many many users).\
ActiveReports from Component one is another great tool.

USe a GUI tool, .NEt has great printing ability, but at best you'll write a
lot of code when a simple GUI based tool can do it for you, faster and
without debugging.

HTH,

Bill