Argos

This is a much better product than Crystal Reports which we used before. It’s quite easy to use! What I like most is that when you print out a data sheet/report on the last page it leaves a trail of how you got to that report. I also like that you can save the reports in various formats to ensure the data prints out accurately.

Our program is ALWAYS down so not sure if that is something related to Argos or the campus system/servers. But, we get emails almost daily that reporting is on hold until an issue is fixed.

The customer service is the best in the business at Evisions. There are a ton of training videos that help in the transition and ongoing use. There a 2 options for creating data blocks with one being for visual users with drag and drop and the other being for more technical users with entering SQL. A lot of our previous Crystal reports could be transferred quickly to Argos with minimal additional work.

Although most of our reports could be transferred quickly, some could not. This led to an entire department staying with Crystal. Their reports were too complicated to move in an efficient manner. There are some limitations to what you can do in the reports, but Evisions does listen to their customers, so updates are done frequently.

I like the way it is designed where you can create datablocks to hold multiple reports, charts and olaps

I have used several other report writer tools and I find Argos to not be as intuitive as it can be.

I love the easy bursting to send reports and the option to ftp the reports. The flexibility of the extract reports to format exactly how you need in different sections is great. I like being able to develop the SQL code into another tool and drop it into Argos to make it look pretty and add further functionality with the data sets. The library of objects saves a lot of time for elements that needs to be used in multiple dashboards. I love that they just keep making the product better all the time and are responsive to enhancement requests from users.

I wish it had an output to Excel format where some formatting could be included. I'm also looking forward to them being compatible with SAML log in capability.

Argos allows me to respond quickly to the numerous requests for data I get each day, as well as giving me a tool with which to address more complicated projects.

Banded reports can be difficult to format. Lining everything up just right is tricky, and spacing gets weird when I use a lot of conditional bands.