.rpt Inspector - Return On Investment (ROI)

Pays for itself in less than 1* use!
Scenario: Acme Inc. has merged with another company and their name has changed to Xtreme Corp. This requires the following changes to 30 reports:
  • All references to the company name in all reports must be changed to "Xtreme Corp."
  • All fonts must change from Arial to Times New Roman
  • All Parameter Default Values for the Parameter Country must be the same in all reports
  • All Formula Definitions for a formula named "ItemPriceMultiplier" must change from ".15" to ".20"

To use our ROI calculator:

  2. Scroll down and Click on the "Update Total" button below.

without .rpt Inspector
Professional Suite

with .rpt Inspector
Professional Suite
Since you have to open each report individually and you can't work with multiple objects across multiple reports, at $your rate$ an hour -- even a simple task of changing all references to the company name and standardizing all fonts in 30 reports will take an average report designer about 15 minutes per report. Even if you use the Repository you'll still have to open each report.
  • Open all 30 reports (or even 300+ reports)
  • Group by font to reveal those that are Arial
  • Select the Arial group and change to Times New Roman
  • Group by Parameter Name
  • Copy Parameter Default Values from Country the report you want to use as your master and paste to multiple Country parameters across the rest of your reports.
  • Group by Formula Definition
  • Select "ItemPriceMultiplier" definition group and modify the definition once. It will be applied to all selected members of the group.

    Alternatively you could use Search & Replace, select Formula object, specify the search criteria (pattern matching / regular expressions supported) and specify replace criteria (pattern matching / regular expressions supported)

Done in less then 15 minutes combined!

Product pays for itself in less than 1* use!

 
Now add to that the time it takes to do any number of other tasks, such as to standardize parameter default values across the same reports. It will take an average report designer about 10 minutes per report.

Now add to that the time it will take to find and modify the Formula definition for a formula named "ItemPriceMultipler" and find all references in this formula and its conditions to change them all from ".15" to ".20". It will take an average report designer about 5 minutes per formula per report.

Total =====================
without .rpt Inspector Professional Suite,
you would have just spent at least
  $

Simple and routine changes like these add up very quickly and before you know it, you've spent more money doing it the old fashioned way -- one object, one property, and one report at a time.
* 1 use calculated based on an average rate of $30 per hour.
Actual number of uses will vary based on your organization's hourly rate for above tasks.
Unlike Crystal Reports, with .rpt Inspector you can open one, two, a hundred, or several hundred reports all at the same time1. Which means you can use the tools in .rpt Inspector to find and filter "in common" objects and properties (formulas, parameters, parameter default values, text, headers, footers, size, driver, database, printer, schedules, instances, database logons, formats, destinations, etc.) across the selected reports, and modify them all at the same time -- all with visual feedback.
 
1 The actual number of reports that you can open at the same time, depends on your system resources. Our users report that they've worked with 300, 600, and even 800 reports all at the same time to modify the various properties (formulas, parameters, parameter default values, text, headers, footers, size, driver, database, printer, etc.) of the selected report(s).