I’ve developed reports in Crystal, Impromptu, and Oracle Reports, and in my humble opinion, all three packages are just awful if you are doing anything more than a simple list. All have many bugs and stupid behaviors, and I end up writing complicated code to dump my data out into a single database view to query instead of using the tool’s native ability to “join” since it is so unpredictable and buggy.

Maybe if the industry would focus on designing a tool that is intiutive to use and actually works, people would be more statisfied. This won’t happen since these companies seem to have more salespeople than competent developers. I would jump at an open source tool in a second, if one existed.