How do you like working with Crystal Reports?

Denise Covington:

You can write simple reports or very complex reports.  Ours tend to have a lot of subreports and grouping and can get complicated very quickly.    One reason is that we want all giving wrapped up under the alumni (personal, business, matching gift and foundation) so we have the entire picture. 

If this is your first time with Crystal Reports, I definitely recommend training!

Good luck.

I actually enjoy creating Crystal Reports and also highly recommend training.  It can seem confusing and very complex at first, but the more reports you do the easier it becomes... although every now and then I'll still be challenged by a report request.  Guess that's the part I enjoy about it. 

Yvette Messenger:
I just ordered an installation disk for Crystal Reports and am wondering how everyone likes working with them.

I definitely recommend training.  After trying to work with it (and writing a few custom reports), we hired a 3rd party trainer to come to us and do custom training that fit our needs.  We were lucky that we had already worked with someone who does training on Crystal and other programs and whom we liked very much.

We also got much better reference books for the training than what we could download from Blackbaud's website.  Before the training we used Blackbaud's support and they were very, very helpful.

 Once you get Crystal, you are going to love it.  It is a great complementary program to the Blackbaud products.