Need for Reporting Software

When was the last time you came across a report on the net? Well, don't you remember the last telephone bill that you accessed on the net? Or the last e-bank statement which was sent to you by your banker? Well, have you ever thought how it is possible to generate these many reports when your banker or your telephone operator have client lists running in millions!!! Well, it is simple. Now we have softwares which does anything for making our lives simpler. Remember the times when we had to plan our budgets on papers, using pens, pencils, erasers and calculators and what not!!! Well, today, you just need to enter the details on an excel sheet and the tools to manipulate your report is abundantly available. You wanna see the total expense or your income after tax, you don't need a calculator also. Its just a click away. In excel, you can define formulas, for calculating complex things and then it just need your input. As soon as you keep putting your expenses, it will keep reducing it from the Balance available in your account. You have a very simple report ready.

For simple reports, Excel is an excellent software. For personal reporting purposes it works brilliantly. But that is not the case with the poor banker or the telephone or internet service provider, who has to do these calculations for millions of their customers. So, as the next step, they approaches a software developer for a solution. Now the software developer develops an application which automates the reporting works and integrates with an existing or a new web portal of his client. Report generation may not be the only thing this application does, it may have the ability to, say report customer complaints and suggestions or do a trading online et al. Now the developer has two options- Create a reporting solution by himself, or embed an efficient reporting software in the application, which can do all the reporting works by itself. Writing codes for reporting solution needs a lot of time, effort and manpower resources. So today programmers go for the easier way, which is an embeddable reporting tool.

Well, problem solved for your Banker or the telephone/internet service provider, and problem solved for the software developer. Wait a minute... You said there are so many reporting tools available in the market, which are they and how will I know which one to use!!! Hmmm... Now this is becoming more interesting. Firstly, different reporting tools provides different features. Its like this, an iPod is a sleek product which can be used for viewing mp4 movies, but when it comes to other commonly used formats like mpeg or mpegav, you may have to opt for a comparatively bulkier Creative Zen Vision or something like that. But you can convert movie files in other formats to mp4 with a software, which again will be time consuming. So, if someone does not want the troubles of all these would go and buy a Zen Vision and a valet to carry it. It is the same case with reporting softwares also. Some are a perfect wed for .Net platform, where are some are developed keeping in mind the Java platform users. For example, JReport or Jasper report works excellent with Java, but does not support .Net framework, whereas Crystal Reports from Business Objects is a good bet for .Net platform users. Now, Crystal report can work on .Net as well as Java with the help of some adapters called JRCs (Java Reporting Components). Now this is like using a software t convert mpegav files to mp4 files. If you don't want these troubles, you can opt for JReport or Jasper Reports.

List of Reporting Softwares available in the Market

Commercial software

• 90 Degree Software
• Actuate
• Cognos BI
• Combit List and Label
• Crystal Reports
• DBxtra - Reporting Software
• i-net Crystal-Clear
• InetSoft Style Report
• Information Builders' FOCUS and WebFOCUS
• Intellicus
• Izenda Ad Hoc
• JReports
• Logi 8 LogiXML
• Microstrategy
• OPRO X Server
• Oracle XML Publisher
• repro
• Microsft SQL Server Report

Free or open source software

• Agata Report
• Eclipse BIRT Project
• JasperReports
• LGX_Report by LogiXML
• Pentaho
• GNU_Enterprise (reporting sub-package)
• CrossCompass_Free

(Major ones are in bold letters)

To know more about the reporting tools available on the market, please click on the links with the reporting software's name.

Crystal Report

Crystal Reports from Business Objects is one of the most familiar tools for developers, through it’s long association with Microsoft and Visual Studio. There are actually two editions of Crystal Reports that developers can use-- Crystal Reports for Visual Studio.NET is the bundled report writer that is included with Visual Studio.NET versions, which Crystal Reports 10 is the stand-alone, retail edition that developers can upgrade to or buy outright. For this review, we will be looking at the latter as most developers upgrade to get the latest features and functionality.

Crystal Reports can report off of a number of different data sources through ODBC, OLAP and direct database drivers and can connect to custom data sources as well. When creating a report from a data source, you can simply drag-and-drop fields onto your report and Crystal Reports will build the SQL automatically for you or you can write your own SQL statement.

The report designer itself is intuitive and there are a number of “experts” or “wizards” to guide you through common reporting tasks, like creating a basic report, creating a running total, and so forth. The number of report formats that Crystal Reports supports is limited only by your imagination and how much time you have on your hands.

A single Crystal Report can include multiple sections (including types of sections, i.e. 2 page headers) and multiple objects in those sections, including charts, graphs, cross-tab tables, geographic maps, formulas, etc.

For exporting a report, Crystal Reports supports over 16 different formats, including HTML, DHTML, PDF, Excel, Word, RTF and Text formats, with special export options for making reports exported to Excel more functional.

On the integration side, Crystal Reports has the widest platform support of any of the tools we looked at in this review, including integrated IDE support for tools from Borland and IBM, as well as platform support for COM, Delphi, .NET and Java. The documentation and samples that ship with the product are good and there is a strong third-party community of Crystal Reports developers that keep Web sites and resources updated.

The one area that developers will struggle with when integrating Crystal Reports is scalability. Business Objects makes it’s money through selling products and licenses, including an enterprise reporting solution called “Crystal Enterprise”.

Developers who want to build large-scale applications will find themselves either purchasing additional licenses or changing their application to work with Crystal Enterprise to get the kind of performance they need. The pricing for these solutions can be prohibitive for developers, especially when other reporting products provide a scalable framework for reporting for the original product price.

Crystal Reports 10
Vendor: Business Objects
Price: $685 for Developer Edition