SAP Crystal Reports Room for Improvement

MVD Prasad - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant General Manager at Soma Enterprise

It has significantly enhanced security features, especially when compared to the standard security features of the earlier PeerSpot version I purchased. I've observed improvements in security, and overall, it's quite commendable.

Regarding potential enhancements for the next release of this solution, I haven't closely examined SAP Crystal Reports 53. I've only encountered it briefly, perhaps once or twice. However, I anticipate that it likely offers advanced features distinct from its predecessor. I believe there may be notable improvements and additions in the latest version, and I look forward to exploring them further.

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Pralhad Yesare - PeerSpot reviewer
Microsoft Dynamics GP Consultant at Deloitte

When connecting the database in Crystal Reports, users are unaware of which data is in which table. We can segregate the tables for sales, data stored in these tables, and property. It is used to pull the data from the backend.

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Alain Vanhaeght - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Project leader at a construction company with 10,001+ employees

SAP Crystal Reports should provide better support for dynamic connectors. The solution should export reports to Excel in a real Excel format and not in a paper-oriented way. The solution should include an easier multi source integration. It would be nice for the main report to have access to multiple sources.

The solution’s technical support could be improved.

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Buyer's Guide
SAP Crystals
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about SAP Crystal Reports. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
MohammadShafiullah - PeerSpot reviewer
MANAGER - IT SYSTEMS at Fabtech

If at all possible, a little bit of improvement on the analytical side is needed. I know there are some other tools that SAP is already working on, but if it is included with Crystal Reports, then it will be much better.

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AB
Software Development Head at a retailer with 11-50 employees

SAP Crystal Reports has some compatibility issues with third-party products. If we want to move our software onto a more recent platform using a recent framework, then SAP Crystal Reports won't work on that.

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NR
IT Manager at AE POWER

The financing part needs improvement. 

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JB
Director of Business Intelligence, Allstate Investments at The Allstate Corporation

Charting capabilities are incomplete relative to competitors.

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it_user448413 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Application Analyst at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think the product is great and has so much now but I have noticed that it is not Excel 10 compatible and when the reports are extracted to XLS it defaults to MS Office version 95-97 which has dropped rows of data from sheet to sheet. I would like to see the ability to use the most current versions of MS Office.

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it_user185778 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Specialist - Crystal Reports / SQL Server at a construction company with 10,001+ employees

The graphing portion of Crystal Reports is still lacking. I realize that there are other Business Objects programs out there more graphics intensive, but it would be nice if Crystal could fully service those needs as well.

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Patryk Golabek - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at Translucent Computing Inc

This was a good platform when it first came out but right now, it has become a complicated behemoth. These days, things are a little more dynamic and you really need a platform where you can change fast, and Crystal Reports is not it. This is an enterprise solution and there is no innovation there. The only innovation comes through a company that develops reports, such as us. A real improvement would be a simpler system that allows users to play with the visualization without needing specialized skills and code.

You shouldn't need a specialized developer just to code a Crystal Report. Ideally, a general-purpose or front-end developer, which is more cost-effective, should be able to do it.

A lot of times, what happens is that developers reuse or repurpose their domain model to use that to pull the data from a database. I think the main model that they use for the web application, the database model, and then use that to run the reports because they don't want to rewrite the code. This means that those entity models they have are too normalized for the crystal reports. Then, it becomes a bit of a mismatch where they have to change those entities and create new ones. Reporting is different than something like getting data from a web application and we really care about the transactions, which means that you always have to denormalize the data. What I've seen a lot of times is that developers kind of get stuck in this mismatch and they have to recode something. Or, they just drop what they did and do it from scratch, remapping the tables or creating new entities. This is a problem because if you promise somebody a report, only to later realize that it needs to be re-coded, it takes additional time. It becomes even more complicated when you need to re-create the business logic.

Because the users can export data to Excel or a PDF, it sometimes leads to data leakage and can create privacy issues. 

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Syed Fahad Anwar - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal System Developer at HHRC

It needs better support for child reports.

It needs additional formulas.

some performance issues when joining tables using report wizard.

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it_user581817 - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder & CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We would like to see a Crystal Reports desktop version with built-in functionality to edit a single reference that exists in multiple formulas. This would be a big time saver. We would also like to select multiple detail area fields and insert the same summary field for all of them instead of having to do it one at a time.

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it_user435318 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Administrator/Application Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
  • Easier to use crosstab interface so beginners create reports faster
  • Allow for customization of crosstab row/column labels
  • Installation takes more than 15 minutes on our workstations
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it_user6606 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Expert at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees
All the options - These same options that allow Crystal Reports to be so customizable and really achieve the report your customers desire can be a burden. If you have "inherited" an existing report, there are a number of different ways that the "Look and Feel" of the report may have been achieved - and sometimes figuring out how something was done in Crystal Reports can be like solving a Hardy Boys mystery!Syntax constructs - the syntax used in Crystal Reports (formulas) is slightly different than most other languages, using a combination of curly brackets and pipes with some traditional syntax. When constructed incorrectly, there isn't much assistance in what steps you need to take to correct your formula - only something telling you it is wrong! View full review »
DS
Senior Manager at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

There are very few options for formatting reports that are exported to Excel or PDF formats.

The “Report Definition” export doesn’t contain all of the information about a report. The only way to get all of the configuration of a report is to write a program using one of the SDKs or to purchase a third-party tool.

SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise, which is the new version of Crystal Reports that is optimized for working with HANA, BEx queries, and other things specific to SAP’s other products definitely lags behind “classic” Crystal Reports in terms of features – especially when it comes to formatting objects.

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it_user269151 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Integration Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

From our experience with it, we would like the ability to change reports en masse in case of backend changes. It would also be nice if it enabled object orientation.

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it_user432762 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Business Intelligence Tools Administrator at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I'd like an easier way for end users or an AD group to subscribe to reports that can be received as attachments to emails.

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it_user167046 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager - Healh IT Systems, HIPAA and Compliance - Meaningful Use Analyst at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

For me, the biggest area for improvement would definitely be the sample reports and wizards with more options and themes you can use to create more report styles.

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it_user5802 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Expert at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Business objects service packs are as notoriously bad as Microsoft new products. Full of bugs, they fix one thing but break others. View full review »
it_user448308 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Reports Programmer at a university with 10,001+ employees

Crystal 2008 - the export functionality could be improved, right now it will only export approximately 65K into one spreadsheet tab. When it reaches the max rows, it will continue on the next tab. This is really only an issue when users are exporting in Business Object. Currently, known larger files need to eported into txt or csv, the end users generally aren't as familiar with bring in this type of file into excel workbook.

Also, charts and mapping functionality could be much improved.

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it_user456375 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Senior Programmer Analyst at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Charts and Graphs are the only reason I don’t give the product a 10/10. Microsoft Excel is far better and Tableau is even better than that. So much so that my company now wants us to start using Tableau as a replacement for Crystal Reports, at least where graphs and charts are concerned.

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it_user448305 - PeerSpot reviewer
Programmer / Reports Designer at a printing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to be able to summarize formulas.

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it_user432603 - PeerSpot reviewer
Town Clerk's Office: General IT, Crystal Reports, Laserfiche Admin, Granicus Admin at a local government with 501-1,000 employees

I have an old version and there's no hyperlink function. Otherwise, everything I could wish for is probably already out there!

However, I had an issue where if I had the main application in one Window and a fly out menu on another monitor, it would crash. It was probably a hardware issue on my side.

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it_user449409 - PeerSpot reviewer
Corporate Trainer/Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

They need to make it work with new file formats for Excel and Access. It also needs to be more compatible with other data sources.

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it_user434991 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Data Sciences at a tech company with 5,001-10,000 employees
  • It needs better graphical visualizations.
  • It needs a better Crystal Viewer.
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it_user446937 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Development at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I feel an improvement would be allowing users to change the font on translated fields. I remember having to work around this by overlaying fields with a formula because formatting was not available in the translation management tool.

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it_user161895 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Expert at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

I would like to see improvement in charts and metadata extraction. Reporting against the actual MDB database is cumbersome at best.

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it_user224157 - PeerSpot reviewer
AVP at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

It needs better integration with Hadoop as well as enhancements for more analytical usage.

Also, a secured end user cannot modify data if the report is generated via Crystal Reports. It can only be done if the data is in HTML format.

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it_user448422 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Developer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see a mobile and iOS friendly version.

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JC
Senior MIS Project Manager at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

There could be improvements made to the analytics capabilities.

Crystal Reports could be more graphical.

Management wants to be able to see everything on one page.

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it_user456381 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant on Health Care Reporting and Analytics at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

I would like to have horizontal paging like crosstabs.

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GE
Manager of Architecture/Design at a government with 501-1,000 employees

The visualization needs work as the look is not very appealing. The UI definitely needs some updating.

Also, SAP charges an annual maintenance fee. Be careful, too, with the license model. I'd suggest that because Crystal Reports is for tabular reports, use another product for true BI.

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it_user463368 - PeerSpot reviewer
Crystal Reports Developer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Eliminate the reserved space in Page Footer section.

Find an easier way to utilize the Database > Links feature, or allow the ability to alter the selection SQL. Crystal Reports makes too many assumptions, causing odd results, which can sometimes be corrected by altering the SQL or changing the links (providing you understand the link options).

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it_user140493 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

There are two items that would improve the product. One is a simple text search across all formulas, and the other is a debug mode that would allow the developer to step line-by-line through long or complicated formulas.

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it_user163092 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Reporting Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Bought and sold many times and newer product releases do not seem to offer much improvement. Maps and gauges are pretty much worthless and you need to buy a third party add-on.

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it_user446715 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant Commercial & ShipConnect / VRS at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Sub-reports in sub-reports
  • Making graphs is very cumbersome
  • Exporting to Excel
  • Using Stored procedures
  • Complex SQL Queries
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it_user628023 - PeerSpot reviewer
Microsoft Nokia Service Manager at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

The sales, operations, and IT areas could use improvement.

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it_user173745 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Analyst at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees

Some features are difficult to use for beginning users, such as shared variables.

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it_user431850 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

The linking feature between tables has always been a bit buggy, which is not good because it is really the core of ensuring that the returned data is correct. If one tries to enforce the links created as per the underlying data source, invariably it falls over and results in an error message.

The cascade parameters limit of 1000 records, which although can be increased via the registry, if you have admin rights, can result in report performance issues. Isn't there a better way of doing this?

Being able to have formulas that make up the description for value parameters, potentially on the fly, and then being able to display the parameter value and/or description selected by the user on the report, would be great also

I actually wrote a blog post of the things I wished Crystal Reports could do here: http://maximumimpactsolutions.co.uk/blog/comments.asp?bd=110. Some of the things may have ready been implemented.

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it_user142782 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Analytics and Integration at a wellness & fitness company with 501-1,000 employees

Some of the graphic displays are dodgy. That component is the least intuitive of all the features.

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it_user448395 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr BOBJ/HANA Consultant at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

Adhoc and tabbed reporting should be added to the next release.

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it_user448683 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Programmer - DB Mgt & Crystal Reports at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

They need to offer better support to clients and have a better knowledge base.

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it_user449433 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead - Report Development at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The functionality is not evolving much over newer releases. The limitation of the original row based model is still there, and there's no easy way to draw tables. I would very much like to see full multi-dimensional reporting capability. The primitive capabilities have not been improved over the last 10 years.

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it_user448401 - PeerSpot reviewer
Programador C#, MVC, Entity Framework, Crystal Reports, ORACLE at a transportation company with 501-1,000 employees

We are using an old version, and the only thing isn't good is that some error messages are not specific and it is sometimes hard to find the error.

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it_user186273 - PeerSpot reviewer
Crystal Reports Developer / DBA at a non-profit with 51-200 employees

Retain parameter lists when upgrading

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Buyer's Guide
SAP Crystals
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about SAP Crystal Reports. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.