Hello people - many thanks for any help you can offer with this,
I've never used Crystal before and I'm just wanting to know if it can do the following before I invest some time in it:
We need to produce a variety of individual reports for 700+ schools, we currently store the data in Access and at the moment we use Excel to design report templates and then use VBA to cycle through data updating it to a school (via ODBC/ADO) before producing a pdf and then going back round and selecting the next school in the list etc. and thus the end result is 700+ pdf documents that are then distributed to schools.
This all works fine to be honest and we can run all the reports overnight, the only thing is we continuously get asked for additions/amendments/new reports and it is very time consuming changing the templates and adding in new charts etc. We need an easy way to amend and adapt the reports - sometimes ad hoc (although generally they are preprepared)
My question therefore is: Does crystal reports allow an easy way to link to Access and automatically produce multiple individual pdf reports for each school based on tables of school data? Second, is it easy to rearrange report pages and add/amend charts/tables etc. and to maybe have new pages based on school type (i.e. only show certain report pages for secondary, some for primary schools and some for both)?
If it's any use I have a lot of experience programming in VB and I know bits of java & .net but I'm hoping crystal allows an easy way of setting up report templates and amending reports/adding new charts/data/tables etc.
Many thanks for any help
Stewart
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