Lets say you have a single report that shows all your product departments and their corresponding managers. When the report is exported to Excel, every product department is placed in a separate worksheet (tab) and the tabs are named after the respective product manager. See the image below for illustration.

What if you wanted each Excel tab to be emailed separately to its corresponding manager while only running the report once?

remiCrystal Build 5045 has added a new feature called Excel Bursting. This feature is very similar to the existing PDF Bursting functionality that has been available in the software for a while.

Excel Bursting for SSRS reports allows you to split a single Excel Report so that each worksheet is placed into a separate file and then delivered to its corresponding recipient (in this case, the product manager).

Unlike SSRS’s native data-driven subscriptions where the report would need to be for each manager, Excel bursting is done by running the report only once!

Setting up Excel Bursting is achieved by simply adding a special Bursting Field to the SSRS report during design time and then getting remiCrystal read the field’s values at runtime.

To get started with Excel Bursting for SSRS Reports, take a look at this How-To article and then download remiCrystal for a free 14-day unlimited trial.

First what is a data-driven task? A remiCrystal data–driven task provides a way to use dynamic task data such as parameter values or email addresses that are retrieved from an external data source at run time. This data source can be your enterprise database, Excel workbook or even a CSV text file. 

In order to create a data-driven task, you must specify the data selection criteria using an SQL Query,  for example:

SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE Country = 'USA' AND City = 'Miami'

When the remiCrystal task runs, it will connect to the specified data source and use the above query to run the reports and deliver them for each record returned. 

The above works marvelously and will always run the reports for the specified criteria. What if, however, you wanted the “Country” and “City” values in the query to be populated from the command line?

First, let’s modify the query above so that it uses parameters instead of static values. We will call our parameters @country and @city and the query will now look like this:

SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE Country = '@country' AND City = '@city'

With this simple change saved, you can now pass in these parameter when executing the remiCrystal task from the command line using the following structure:

[path to remicrystal.exe] /ex "[path to remicrystal rctx task file]" /extdataparams "[pipe delimited key/value pairs of parameters]"

To put the above structure into practice, the command line looks like this:

"c:\program files (x86)\remiware\remicrystal\remicrystal.exe" /ex "c:\users\johndoe\documents\my remicrystal tasks\customer reports.rctx" /extdataparams "@country=usa|@city=new york"

Voila! When the above command is executed, the @country and @city parameters in our external data SQL Query will be replaced with USA and New York respectively.

As you can see, this feature is very useful for advanced users that would like to run one data-driven task and have the SQL Query customized based on command line arguments. 

Here are some scenarios when this feature can be used:

• limiting the data that the data-driven task can access based on the logged in ID of a user
• invoking a remiCrystal task from a website and passing the web session ID to remiCrystal
• having scripts (PowerShell, Batch file, SQL) that run a single data-driven task but each script is set to pass different parameter values
• invoking remiCrystal from your application where the parameter values are calculated using custom logic

To get started with this feature and more, download the free unlimited 14 day trial of remiCrystal today!

In remiCrystal, Post-Processing Actions are actions that allow you to carry out business process automation tasks after the report has been produced and delivered. For data-driven or bursting tasks, the actions can be set to run for every record in the recordset or just once after every record has been processed.
remiCrystal offers these Post-Processing Actions:

• Send Email: this is useful to send an alert of when the task has completed running
• Write to File: this action is useful for creating a log file or audit log for when the tasks run
• Run SQL Query: this very useful action is used to carry out Create/Read/Update/Delete (CRUD) querries against any ODBC compliant database. This can be done in order to mark records as processed or to delete records from the database that should no longer exist after the reports have been run.
• Run A Program: remiCrystal can invoke an external application to run after the reports have been excuted

Until recently, Post-Processing Actions would run regardless of whether or not the reports run successfully and this was something that we felt needed improving.

Starting with build 5039, users of remiCrystal can now specify to run the post-processing actions under the following conditions:

• Always: the actions are run regardless of the result of the report execution
• On Success: the actions are run only when the vital reports are produced and delivered successfully
• On Failure: the actions are run only when the vital reports fail or the delivery fails

To create a remiCrystal task that uses conditional post-processing actions, create the task as normal and when you add your Crystal Reports or SSRS Report, make sure to flag them as  “Vital” (see image below) so that any errors are not ignored. Next, go to the post-processing tab and add one or more actions. You will notice that you now have the option to select the condition underwhich the custom action will run.

And thats all there is to it! To get started with using remiCrystal and conditional post-processing actions, download the unlimited 14-day trial today!

There are numerous articles out there that compare Microsoft PowerBI to Crystal Reports however I feel they go too deep into the technical mumbo-jumbo and don’t quite state the obvious.
Lets get this out of the way; comparing these two products is unfair to either of them and as a result I have seen some users struggle as they try to bend PowerBI into a Crystal Reports replacement.
PowerBI is Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) tool for creating reports and dashboards to deliver insights fast. PowerBI reports and dashboards can be accessed on the powerbi.com website using any web browser however the bulk of the report design is done using a desktop application called PowerBI Desktop for Windows. 
Compared to Crystal Reports, the charts and user interface of PowerBI is more interactive with support for chart drill-down and drill-through, and also looks and feels a lot more modern. PowerBI reports are able to connect to a lot more data sources as oppsed to mostly relational databases as is the case with Crystal Reports.
With all the above, it almost sounds as though replacing Crystal Reports with PowerBI is a no-brainer. There are however good reasons to hold on to Crystal Reports still.

Where PowerBI offers you a canvas to drop charts on to, Crystal Reports offers a more structured document structure where objects can be placed in the page header, report header, groups, details and so on. Crystal Reports automatically paginate the contents of the reports when exported out or printed where as PowerBI does not i.e. a table in PowerBI will not automatically flow to the next page even if its contents exceed the size of the page.

Another huge advantage for Crystal Reports is that it supports many more export formats such as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, PDF and more whereas PowerBI has only recently added support for PDF export and the export to Excel or CSV is limited to only 30,000 records.
When it comes to supporting developers, Crystal Reports is also far ahead of PowerBI. Crystal Reports has had its SDK and API (the Crystal Reports Runtime Library) for a very long and therefore it can be embedded and used by other applications. PowerBI on the other hand also an API (REST API) however this cannot be used to export the reports or dashboards therefore limiting its utility.

While using cloud and web services is currently all the rage, there are just some scenarios where keeping your data inside your firewall makes the most sense when taking security into consideration. In order to fully utilize PowerBI, you have to upload your reports and data to Microsoft’s servers. Of course this is not the case with Crystal Reports which can be operated fully within the confines of your organization’s network and firewall.
On the pricing side, PowerBI may appear to be the cheaper option with just $9.99/user pricing, however, this number can grow very fast should you need to share your reports with hundreds or thousands of users.

When it comes to comparing PowerBI to Crystal Reports, you must first ask yourself if what is most suitable for the task is a paginated report (a structured report like Crystal Reports or SSRS Reports than can flow to multiple pages) or a non-paginated report (a single report whose data is constrained to a single page). The answer to this question will largely depend on not just how and who the consumer of the report is, but also how the report will be distributed.

Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t write this article to bash PowerBI and praise Crystal Reports. In fact, you can replace the words “Crystal Reports” in this article with Microsoft SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) and the arguments would remain true. PowerBI is a great data visualization tool that makes building and sharing dashboards very easy. Crystal Reports is (still) a great tool for creating paginated reports that can be exported to a plethora of formats. Both tools can, and should both be in your Business Intelligence arsenal.