Wayne West (3/5/2015)
podmate (3/4/2015)
...I would write a screed about how slow SSRS is, how bloated the report files are and how painful the report builder/bids tools are to use, but then you can compare SSRS to Crystal and realize that they both blow chunks.Which is why MS Access is my go-to tool for developing reporting systems against SQL Server. I've used, and loathed, Crystal since it was bundled with SQL Server 4.21 in the '90s. Fortunately, as far as I know, they don't have CR at my current gig.
We'll both take some heat on this but I agree... SSRS leaves a whole lot to be desired and I'd rather use Access than SSRS. Haven't played with Crystal but I've had to build programs to cleanup the thousands of temp files that the old Crystal used to produce (1 for each page rendered).
On a similar note, I wish MS would have given the same functionality to PIVOT that's available in Access. It's much more like I would have expected in Access... easy to use, self-realizing in many cases, and incredibly powerful.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.