There's not always a report writer to be had or allowed to be had, Joe. Learning how to do a cross tab on all sorts of data is an essential skill.

While I agree with everything you said in your latest post above, there was no need for you to bust the OPs chops in the post previous to that nor do I agree that it takes 2 to 3 years to teach someone to be really "useful" at T-SQL. Your comments were inappropriately negative. If you spent less time being negative with the student, there'd be more time to teach and exercise the student. Take the negativity out and you could probably get it down to 6 months or so.