March 24, 2005
Crystal Reports - Are you legal?
Are you running Crystal Reports legally? As you know Crystal Reports comes on a CD. But the software license with that CD is for installation on only one computer. If you’re installing the software on multiple computers, Crystal wants to you purchase a multi-user license.
I only became aware of this a couple of years ago myself.
If you click on the Price Lists links on the left you can see how much a multi-user license costs you. They go in five packs. Don’t forget to add the 16% enhancement fee to the price.
The thing to remember with Crystal is, its number of installed licenses, not the number of concurrent users.
There is nothing to physically stopping you from installing it on multiple computers, it’s up to you and your sense of honesty.
Posted by Ted at 10:20 AM
March 10, 2005
Sales Comparison Report
This means the user can compare this month to the same month last year or two years ago. They can compare this month to last month. They can compare the current quarter to any other quarter or the whole year to another year.
If you click here and you can download a PDF for some sample data.
I wind up modifying this report to meet a client’s specific requirements. They may want to consolidate by salesperson, customer, state or almost anything.
I think it’s informative.
Posted by Ted at 07:47 PM
March 09, 2005
Crystal XI Released
Crystal Reports XI has been released.
I just received a brochure in the mail describing Crystal XI and it looks nice. Those who know me know I am a big fan of Crystal Reports. It really lets me extract the information stored in Great Plains in a readable useful format.
I have done over 150 reports for one client alone.
Some of the new features that look good are...
1) Dependency Checker - the brochure says, “Quickly find broken links, formula errors and dependency issues.” That looks handy.
2) Cascading Prompts – In this case, it allows me to design a report in which prompts to the user can depend on how the user responded to a previous prompt. For example, I could first prompt the user for state and then after the user picked a state, I could then prompt him for a city within THAT state. Very cool.
3) Dynamic Prompts – one of my frustrations with Crystal in the past is giving the user a selection list to pick from. For example, if I wanted to give the user a choice of salesperson ID to pick from, I could do that. However, if the user later added more salespeople to Great Plains, those salespeople would not show up in my pick list until I refreshed it. Crystal XI seems to have answered that. This is a big one for me.
If you’re a Great Plains user and you have purchased Crystal Reports, you should automatically get Crystal XI, when you get the next release of Great Plains. Unfortunately, I don’t know when that is.
However, I am rather hot to get my hands on Crystal XI.
Posted by Ted at 08:50 PM