Information is power. In today’s world, where we have computers that are as powerful as yesterday’s supercomputers, there is a lot of information at our disposal. Being able to convert all this information into useful data is key for many businesses. There are many products available to make this possible, and Crystal Reports is by far one of the most popular. Having been around since the mid-80’s and having millions of users, Crystal Reports is probably the most easily recognized name in report writing software.

With the advance of technology and the Internet, it’s possible to do business with colleagues on the other side of the world as if they were sitting next to you. This has driven business to be much more competitive and complex. Writing reports is just one small part of delivering information to business users. Business Intelligence (BI) is the gathering and analysis of data throughout an enterprise to gain a sustainable competitive advantage. In 2003, Crystal Decisions was acquired by the BI enterprise software company, Business Objects. Because of this acquisition, Crystal Reports became a part of a complete suite of tools for tracking, analyzing and managing enterprise data.

As one part of the entire BI picture, Crystal Reports gives you the ability to gather data from a variety of data sources and present it in native form, either on paper or via the computer, as well as export it to external applications such as MS Word or Excel. By giving the layman the power to pull data from all types of data sources and present it in multiple formats, Crystal Reports plays a key part in a company’s BI strategy. Crystal Reports XI is the most user friendly and feature rich version of Crystal Reports to date.