At the other end of the spectrum, power programmers who have mastered report writers will find writing reports too time consuming and it slows down their productivity to a crawl. In order to come up with a better solution we must first recognize the problems that are inherent in conventional report writers when they try to create a columnar report. Conventional Report Writer Inadequacies Creating a columnar report with a conventional report writer is a lot of hard work. It's no wonder programmers don't like writing reports. It's too much hard work .
Programmers can spend half a day doing a couple of reports.
Not only that, but a lot of this work may seem like deja vu because they're already done the same work when they designed their database grids. What we need is a smart report component that will quickly produce reports directly from a grid so the report will have all of the fields properly formatted , positioned and error free the very first time the report is printed. This smart report component would eliminate all of the steps outlined above so the report can be completed in just a few seconds. You don't have to wait years or even months for this technology to be developed. Forget about the antiquated and laborious methods of using report writers to print a grid.