SAP Crystal Reports

1. Depending on the report requirements, Crystal reports has great capabilities to allow you to create all kinds of reports. You can place images, forms etc using OLE.
2. It allows a user to define multiple data sources, making it flexible when transferring to different platforms.
3. It allows a user to conditionally suppress sections within the report which enables certain parameters to be checked in certain sections of the report.
4. It enables the drill-down feature which allows the final user of the report to drill down further within a report to view more specific details.
5. It can do complex queries and allows a user to incorporate SQL statements in a flexible manner.
6. A user can create sub-reports, group selections and easily format various sections of the report in order to achieve different requirements.
7. It allows format parameters to be used easily and flexibly e.g. one item on the report can be bolded and displayed in italics due to specified parameters.
8. Supports different types of data sources e.g. HANA, MS SQL, Excel etc

1. For a new user, it might be challenging to create new reports and one might not fully utilize most of the features.
2. Graphical features such as charts are not as enhanced as in other reporting tools.
3. Development of complex reports might take a bit of time depending on the user's experience level
4. When you export a report created with crystal reports to excel, there is a lot of distortion depending on the excel format. It will take a lot of trial and error and eventually, the data on the report is hard to edit on excel.
5. It might crash often after a software update.

There is nothing about this product that is useful. It may have been a good reporting tool before, but there are many other products out there now that would be better to use.

It is a very convoluted and tricky system to figure out how to use, it takes forever to figure out how to use. It is very old school and inundated.

Crystal Reports lets you create custom reports that allows you to extract data that you need. It is a great tool to drill down to a certain level when you have a large pool of data. I love the fact that you can schedule Crystal Reports through BI, and have them emailed or saved to a network folder.

It isn't always intuitive. Creating formulas can be tricky and some of the functions and operators don't work as you would logically expect them to. Creating a report can be very time consuming.

simple and cost effective
tight integration with sap
easy deployment and scalability

user interactiveness on report designs, lacks ease of use for end users to build reports of their own.