Oh yeah... The age old problem of people not knowing what they want or need.

I have a whole bundle of statistical reports which was done on request but we still do give out "data dumps" in XLS format to the people that don't know what they want and/or need

Personally for me a report should have the least amount of data in it. It should be a summary of the data in your DB. And then based on whatever exceptions are drawn from that you can have your larger reports but based on very specific pieces of data rather than having something with thousands of records in it. With us I find mails going out with large reports clogging our e-mail system to the point where the report itself does not even want to send. Also from a management perspective you would like to know where to go and have a look rather than just thrashing around with raw data. I find the thrashing around in raw data to be kind of a blind exercise which consumes time and rarely comes to any results