The easiest way to let users create their own reports is to buy each one a copy of CR XI. You give them the base reports and they tweak them to their hearts desire. However, I'm assuming that by making this post you are looking to save costs and write an app in VB.NET. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done.

CR has modified their licensing so that you can buy CR XI R2 Developer edition and you can now do dynamic report creating within your application. This is a much cheaper alternative than buying licenses for everyone. The caveat is that this only works via programming code. Thus, your boss would have to write procedures that customize each report. Not what you are looking for. There are no third party applications which let a user modify an existing report because this goes against the CR license. Your boss could write something like this just for your own company, but then he wouldn't have time to do anything else for the next three months except code.

So you really need to buy either CR XI Professional for each person or the Standard edition (cheaper, but limited in database functionality).

Hope this helps.

Yeah. Office apps are probably your best way to go. MS Access has a nice reporting feature. And like you said, most people are already familiar with Excel. I guess one big reason they are so popular is because they make tasks like this easy for the common person.

Good luck.


Edited by BrianBischof - 25 Sep 2007 at 2:16pm