Crystal Reports Training Classes and Seminars

Crystal Reports is an application, marketed to small and medium businesses, that is used to create customizable professional reports by drawing data from a variety of designated sources. Major features of crystal reports include report design and formatting, report viewing, and application integration. Through the use of data via crystal reports, you can gain deeper insights to your company's business information to make more informed financial decisions, and position your products and services for a greater competitive advantage.

Small and Medium sized businesses use Crystal Reports. 39,349 companies currently use SAP's Crystal Reports, most with 50-200 employees and 1 million to 10 million dollars in revenue. Some examples of companies that use Crystal Reports are UnitedHealth Group Inc, Netsmart Technologies Inc., and Molina Healthcare Inc. Crystal Reports also bosts a 58 percent marketshare, making it the leader in reporting software, beating out competitors like Oracle XML Publisher and Cognos Impromptu.

The latest version of Crystal Reports is Crystal Reports 2016, also known as version 14.2.x , which was released on March 8, 2016. The previous version to this was Crystal Reports 2013.

The full version of SAP Crystal Reports 2016 retails online for $495, and the 2016 upgrade retails for $295 for those who only need to upgrade their version. Government, education, not-for-profit, and/or volume pricing for 3 or more licenses may be available to customers located in the US.

The main difference between Crystal Reports and SSRS is that Crystal Reports is built for those with little to no programming experience. However SSRS is built around direct SQL, therefore it requires the user to have some database background knowledge to work with it. SSRS also offers more complex reporting and is a more powerful tool than Crystal Reports. However, for everyday business users operating without a database background, Crystal Reports is the way to go.

The Crystal Reports application allows you to connect to various data sources to obtain data for building custom reports. These data sources can be SQL Server databases for example. When you connect to the SQL database, Crystal Reports connects to your SQL server through your network, pulling the data you request through an SQL query.