Crystal Reports is a design application for creating powerful and compelling reports that transform data, from virtually any data source, into meaningful information. Hundreds of thousands of business users and application developers alike have discovered the power and flexibility of Crystal Reports. Not just a tool for application developers, Crystal Reports is also an application for a wide variety of organizational users who need to analyze and interpret important information for better presentation and decision making. Many corporate business users get their information from a variety of legacy mechanisms that are still prevalent today—custom applications, mainframe reports, ASCII files, and so on. But, these mechanisms do very little to maximize the investment that organizations often make in their corporate Information Technology systems.

Features of Crystal Reports
Following are the key features that make it so popular among the developers and provide the reason for using it in my application.

The report design interface is extremely user friendly and accommodating for users of different skill levels. The Crystal Reports application is extremely visual based, allowing users to intuitively construct reports with the support of several Explorers or development components.

Designers now have a truly object-oriented design environment that allows them to intuitively create powerful report content.

Crystal Reports also supports such industry and technology standards as Extensible Markup Language (XML), Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), and Object Linking and Embedding for Databases (OLE DB).

One of Crystal Reports' core strengths is its capability to connect to virtually any data source via a variety of data connectivity methods. These data sources can include relational database management systems (RDBMS), spreadsheets, text files, custom data sources (Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), and COM objects), and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) structures. Crystal Reports can recognize and report against tables, views, system tables, synonyms, and stored procedures within a RDBMS environment to better incorporate various database strategies into the overall report design process.

Crystal Reports is quite unique in its capability to directly connect to multiple data sources within any single report. If commonality does exist in the data between two or more sources, such as Sales or Order information, it might be advantageous to construct an amalgamated display that merges this information into one report.