Great point! Totally agree on the developer's "lack of interest" in this tool, and this is understandable. Why would you spend time on something that you would not use yourself? Especially when you are LEARNING a million things a day, and trying to grasp the load of information you are being exposed to during a "developer training"...
But I think as the SQL Reports get used more and more, the "Power User" will get into that.
Not just this particular product, but I run across many things that I believe eventually will make the "Power User" segment in the IT education industry stronger, and more popular... More training sessions specifically tailored for the people that are not developers, but savvy computer users that like to "dig in"...
And I think selling this particular tool as an "Add On", or charging some extra for it might help grabbing some attention...
Good job on pointing that out.
Generate Ad-hoc Reports with Microsoft Reporting Services 2005
http://www.devx.com/dbzone/Article/28047#rateThisContentLink
I have looked at Report Builder and run some demos. The product is easy to use and the report model helps the user. The problem is the user must be connected to SQL Server to use the report.
My goal in using Report Builder was to distribute data to the user with a limited function report writer. For example, the last 12 financial statements for the divison of a company. The user could export to Excel, select a month of data or select a group of accounts. The user would probably install the report on a laptop computer.
Currently, the solution to this problem remains Excel.
Bob Neal
The big chore I've come across with Report Builder is translating all the database fields into recognisable form for end users eg: only after a few years working with this database, I've come to recognise the cryptic a-re-dte ( not my choice in naming conventions ) is the Actual Receipt Date field, as opposed to re-en-dte which is the Receipt Entry Date field.
It would also be good to see a few more report templates available. After using the Visual Studio Report Designer to produce some promising reports with Detail, Summary, Matrix and Graph all on one report its a little bit of a come-down to be limited to such basic report templates.
Leif
Without any idea of your environment or setup I'd take a stab at saying that the report you built returned zero rows due to Report Builders implicit use of inner joins when you have more than one table in the report. Am I close?
I'm close to putting our "end-user" reporting project on hold due to lack of functionality. The current incarnation of report builder provides pretty much same functionality as our current antiquated reporting system. It does add drag and drop functionality, but not much else.
