In the early 90’s, sharing reports was not as straightforward as it is today due to several factors. One of those factors was that the default format for sharing documents back then was Microsoft Word and it had some severe limitation including:
- it was proprietary and required a license of Windows and Microsoft Office to read the documents
- documents with images ended up being very large in size and therefore very hard to share via email (remember these way the days of floppy disks and 56k modems)
- in order for fonts in the document to display correctly on the end-user, they needed to have the same fonts as the document owner
- in regards to Crystal Reports, exporting to this format was slow and used up a lot memory