On Nov 12, 2010, at 1:02 AM, Roger Deschner wrote:

> I've been using SPSS for this purpose for some time,

I love Roger's sense of humor. He knows I used to install SPSS and SAS under VM 
in academia, where PhD candidates in several disciplines learn how to use SPSS 
or SAS to crunch numbers in pursuit and defense of their PhDs. And he knows I 
know how smart he is and have an idea of how he learned SPSS. ;-) 

Maybe he's right; maybe it's a great tool for the task, especially if you 
already have it. 

But I'm having a hard time convincing myself that trying to learn SPSS or SAS 
for this isn't more effort than I meant to invest in this. I know those 
programs do lots of things I don't need, and it's possible that learning 
Crystal Reports or BIRT/Eclipse is just as much an effort as learning SAS or 
SPSS. But if that's the best answer of how to learn how to swim in this body of 
water, I may decide to stay on the beach and be glad I don't have a mandate to 
actually do this. I'm just intimidated by the implicit comparison between 
SAS/SPSS and those 4GL report writing tools. 

Thanks,
Nick