• I had a teacher who told me of a system rewrite that she did. When she began the project, she compiled a list of all of the required reports. System went live, had some fixes required, and everything went fairly smooth. Then she got a call from a department saying that they weren't receiving their "numbers" report. She checked her list, and all reports were accounted for. She went to the department and asked to see a copy of their numbers report.

    It was a core dump. Whatever the report had been, it crashed, produced a core dump, and the department received it and dutifully filed it away, without having a clue as to what it was or wasn't. But they weren't getting their numbers report, dammit!

    At my previous job we conducted a multi-week Crystal training session for our ERP system. The problem was that the ERP vendor wouldn't release a good data dictionary and their naming scheme (such as it was) was crazy obtuse, so if you needed a report, you were pretty much dependent on the vendor to produce a view. I'd be surprised if more than 5% of the people attending that training ever produced a report.

    If there's no statutory requirement to maintain hardcopy, drop it in to Excel or Access and teach them how to drill down.

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    [font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]