Creating Reports

[BK]

A little rant first...

I have 15+ years experience with developing software. Why is it that
everything related to creating reports in .NET seems so convoluted to
me? I don't want to use Crystal. I've worked with SQL Reporting
Services and I'm not impressed. I've spent time looking at the new
ReportViewer control and I'm not impressed. The ReportViewer seemed
promising, but it is just so counterintuitive to me. What am I missing
here? .Net is a GREAT environment, I absolutely love it. I constantly
praise .Net here at work. But reports are going to be the death of me.

Anyone have any ideas on where I can go to learn how to deal with
reports?

 

[AMDRIT]

Here, we haven't used Crystal Reports. Personally,I would rather create
reports in Access than Crystal.

However, most reports that we generated ended being converted to Excel. So
we just created a library for generated XML Excel files, complete with pivot
tables. For "static" non-interactive reports, we build a Word document from
a template and optionally export to PDF. This offering seems to solve our
needs, since our users didn't care if they were in Word or Crystal Reports.

However, I have used Crystal Reports in the past, even the version with
VS'05. I find that the knowledge base articles on Crystal's website are
enough to get me through the rough spots. MS's knowledge base seems
sufficient for the report viewer.

My approach to this whole thing is to read several articles relating to the
component and compile a broader definition of its capabilities. Armed with
that, I usually have a better handle of asking the right questions on
google, MSDN, or whatever.