Printing in SSRS vs. Crystal Reports

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I am trying to decide on a reporting service to use and so far I have the general feel that many people believe that SSRS is gaining ground on Crystal if it has not already surpassed it. From what I've researched, it seems that looking forward SSRS would be the best choice but one major flaw/weakness that it has opposed to CR is that when it comes to printing the reports CR is much more accurate and user-friendly than SSRS. The reason being is that in order to present most of these reports they must be in either a .pdf or paper format so this would be a major hiccup in regards to choosing SSRS.

Would anyone that has experience with this issue from either the CR or SSRS side have any advice or opinions on this?

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printingreporting-servicescrystal-reports
Can you reword this to ask a specific, answerable question? I have a fair bit of SSRS experience, including with creating .pdf's but I'm not sure what you are asking. Yes, SSRS can create PDF's, and you can have a lot of control over page size and layout. – Jamie F
Jaime, sorry if my question was unclear. From what I've researched, it seems to me that CR is more "What you see is what you get" when it comes to staying true to the report design when printing and SSRS is more ideal for viewing on a monitor or in a browser. Now I'm not sure how accurate these claims are but I have seen a few people bring them up, but if they exist I do not know if they are even drastic enough to warrant concern. – Don
So my question is, have you ever had any difficulty or problems with finalizing a report in SSRS as a PDF or in print for presentation? – Don

1 Answers

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The only printing-related feature I've can think of that is difficult in SSRS is the ability to place a background image and print fields on top of that. This can be done, but from what I understand, it is easier in Crystal than SSRS.

When simply creating a report in SSRS, you can easily forget to set some of the PDF related options such as page size and orientation, but if you remember to set these appropriately and preview your report output in PDF, I don't think you'll have many problems. Like printing Excel documents, without some optimization, page breaks can show up in awkward places, but it is easy to fix this, or catch this in desigining the report, if you are aware of the issue.

SSRS doesn't necessarily assume that reports will be printed. The designer is not aimed exclusively at page layout. And some of SSRS's features, such as dynamic expand/collapse of sections, won't work with printed output of course.