Crystal going away will hurt our organization

Patricia Lewis

Thanks Joshua, exactly what I needed!

Kim Wolcott

Their canned reports are still going to be using Crystal.

John Wooster

Hi Nate. Thanks for your post. I understand your frustration and believe we can help you. I'm with MissionBi and we provide direct RE/FE NXT database access to connect reporting tools like PowerBI, Tableau, Crystal, F9, and other industry standard BI reporting solutions. Please DM me or send an email to John@MissionBI.com and I'll be happy to discuss options on how you can accomplish what you are trying to do.
John

Lyngblomsten Foundation

Or even more frequently, as they've shown lately. Do you think they might have used their heads and have given users 60 days' notice and had it go away in, I don't know - maybe March?! Nope, let's screw customers by taking it away at the busiest time of year.

Lisa Theurer

We use Crystal, but have it loaded on our machines, we don't need to use it through BB. Good luck figuring out your new processes. Not being able to close out the year as normal will add extra work for many.

Lyngblomsten Foundation

Lucky you, Lisa! I'd give anything to have those old diskettes that had Crystal loaded on them!

Peter McKay 2

Hi Tom, this is what I'm interested in. By the end I had basically de-coupled RE and Crystal. I would simply export excel sheets and have Crystal scoop them up. The internal RE Crystal connection was always too buggy. Anyway, I'm really considering getting a Crystal license ($495 per year, I think) and using it as a standalone application to fashion reports out of excel exports. I'm kind of nervous to move forward. Is this what you're doing? Thanks!

Sally Jenkins

I debated buying a CR license but have decided on a different direction, although I'm a big fan of Crystal R.

I now export files to an MS Access database and do all our reporting from the MS Access application. Since MS Access is part of our MS Office 365 license there is no cost to us (and cost is very important, as we are a small org). Linking MS Access to the RE Access database is easy, you can also link easily to spreadsheets. The thing I like about use Access is that I can manipulate the data using queries prior to reporting on it. Learning how to use MS Access basics is not difficult, just takes some time and trial and error. Because my background is in programming I have been able to write VBA code to handle some of the more complicated data issues and produce great reports. I've also built an easy interface so someone else can take over when the time comes.

Feel free to contact me directly if you have questions.

Tom Klimchak

Sooo.. here's what we're doing with Crystal Reports right now:

We DO have a site license (yay) so it hasn't been a big issue for us. We're on the Microsoft Azure servers as well, so in RE NXT we can click the pancakes and go to “Hosted Files” which takes us to our Tenant File Share.

On that hosted file share we have a folder we called “CustomReports” and we just store all our Crystal Report .rpt files there along side our Microsoft Access database files.

I haven't tested this thoroughly, but we were able to build a Crystal Report file on the LOCAL PC drive and link it to a Microsoft Access file. Everything worked locally and we just moved it over to our CustomReports hosted folder and set up a custom report in RE database view. As long as everything is perfectly set up it seems to work just as it did before: We run a Custom Report in Database view, it kicks down a Microsoft Access File filled with data and then Crystal Reports opens, connects to that file and… shows the report.

I suspect we're a little lucky in how this has all worked so far. I haven't had to build something from scratch yet, which I suspect will be a little more difficult. Bottom line: we can EDIT Crystal reports locally, copy them over to the hosted share and then set up a Custom Report and everything seems to work… so far.