In between watching trailers for I Am Legend and raking leaves, I’ve been using Crystal Reports XI a lot lately. I mean really using it—OLAP cubes, Custom Functions, posting questions on the Business Objects message board—the whole nine yards. Somebody at work heard that I was pretty good with it and the next thing I know I have 40 complex reports to develop.

I suppose that explains why I was on a mailing list announcing the official release of Crystal Reports 2008 this past October. (I’ve waited until now to post about the release because the Crystal Reports people have a history of releasing new editions where something important is either missing or wrong. UPDATE: Sure enough, the License released in October had a major error and had to be re-issued.) While it would have been more interesting to be on a mailing list that announced that SAP was about to buy the company behind Crystal Reports for $6 billion just a few days later, I take what I can get.

Ken Hamady at The Crystal Reports Underground has a good writeup about all the new bells and whistles (and the ones that are gone), so I won’t retread that ground.

I remember buying Crystal Reports at the Georgia Tech bookstore when the company was still called Crystal Services. And then it became Seagate. And then Crystal Decisions. And then Business Objects.

All that turnover in the corner office might be why certain basic features consistently get overlooked—like the ability to save a report in an earlier format. Who knows, maybe after each buyout the new engineers can’t reach the old engineers on their new yachts.

Happy Reporting.