Crystal vs Actuate reporting

Guys,

Could anyone tell me how Crystal is different from Actuate reporting? I am basically an Actuate report developer and wondering how flexible is Cystal reporting. My knowledge of Crystal is very limited (with ver 7) We are planning to move away from Actuate possibly to Crystal provided if it is flexible enough to do everything. How easy/difficult to do the following...

1. DB Connection: Can I Connect to different DBs? Read UserID/Password info from a text file or a table instead of defining in the report?
2. Drop-down parameters: Dynamically populating parameter values from DB into the Drop-down.
3. Can I control whats goes into the drop-down box based on the user role.
4. Generate reports where the data comes from multiple DBs.
5. Page-leve security
6. Drill-down reporting - Tree view
7. Dynamic Cross-Tab reports -
8. LDAP Integrating
9. Single Sign-on
10. Output in PDF/Excel
etc...

Please point out if these feature are available out of the box. I looked at the latest version features and it says we can do it all. I would like to hear from you what you think whats possible and what not with out much effort.

Thanks,
PSGuys,

I am very sure some of you have used not all but at least some of these tasks. I would appreciate it if you could respond to only those tasks and comment how easy/difficult to do for a beginner. Whats available out of the box. We can directly talk to sales guys but we do not think we get the correct picture unless you talk to people who is actually using the product.

Thanks a lot for your time.

PSsql

Crystal reports: passing DATA to main report

hey everyone:

I have a report with a number of subreports which basically contain ranking data with ranks stores in certain catagories. What I would like to be able to do is at the end of the report, take all of the store_ids that show up on the subreports, and total up their rankings for one aggregate score.

This involves sending data back from the subreports to the main reports, and I would need to pass both the store_id and ranking number.

Is there a way to accomplish this with the current report setup? The one idea I had is to use a shared array for each subreport, and at the end of the report I can handle each array, but that would involve looking for matching store id's, and since i am NOT a programmer, that would take me a long time to accomplish.

so if anyone has any simpler solutions, i would really appreciate it.

edit: Crystal reports 8.5, fwiwWhat is the difficulty you are facing with comparison?
Give more details

Crystal Mandatory Fields

Hiya,

I'm writing a crystal report linking with an Access Database.

basically I need to say If Address line1 = "" then display section A if not, do nothing,

but I have to do this for about 30 fields, How would i go about doing this?

Basically, it picks up data from the database,If everything is filled in when the report is run, the report orints out fine, if something is blank or a null value then it will pick up details section B which will say "The following fields need to be filled in" and then it will list the fields?

Any ideas

Thanksif you want to suppress whole section A if addressline ="" then right click on section A -> format section -> there is a button beside suppress text click on it and write down:
if addressline ="" then true else false

It will suppress that section and if you want to suppress some fields only then you have write this on each and every field in design view and for that you have to right click on that field -> formate field -> and here also same you have to write "if addressline ="" then true else false" in suppress button script.

Best of Luck|||better use

if isnull(addressline) then
true
else
false

CROSSTAB QUERY FROM ACCESS TO SQL

Hello,
I'm quite basically new to working with SQL databases, coming from a
Microsoft Access background. As we've got the SQL server sitting here,
I've been asked to get the MS Access db's moved across onto it. I've
had no problem with the tables, but as the majority of the reporting
comes from cross tab queries I'm having trouble getting started with
the design of a cross tab/pivot view. I've tried all the examples the
search on groups provided but I'm having a hard time making it work for
me.
I'm reporting off one table tblMONTHCOSTS, the data at the moment is
displayed as
txtMOBILE NO txtBILLMONTH curCALLCOST
078******** 200501 15.25
077******* 200501 12.54
078******** 200502 9.54
077******* 200502 10.55
And so on...... For 12 months, for 39 mobile phones.
What I want it to do is display like this :
txtMOBILE NO 200501 200502 200503......
078******** 15.25 9.54
077******* 12.54 10.55
Does anyone have any advice on how this can be done? I know I'm
pretty new to this so if you could even just point me in the direction
of a good book I would be very grateful.
ThanksRefer this
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/jeffs/archive/2005/05.aspx
Madhivanan