Using a Third Party Report Designer

Even though SchoolLeader comes with over 150 standard reports, there may be times when you need a special report with functionality not provided by SchoolLeader.  In this situation, the option to create your own reports with a Report Writer tool becomes an powerful tool.  

To support this concept, SchoolLeader provides you with over 20 full featured "Data Views" that provide easy access to all your school's data within SchoolLeader's database.  These Data Views allow you to use a professional Report Writer such as Crystal Reports® or MS Access® to create an unlimited amount of your own reports.  Although these are the two most popular report writers, any report writer that can read Microsoft SQL Server® databases will work just well with SchoolLeader

Since the reports are actually designed and created using a third party tool of your choice (e.g. Crystal Reports, MS Access, etc.), documentation on how to design such reports is beyond the scope of this manual.  Please refer to the specific User Guide's for these products to learn how to design and create the actual reports using these tools.   However, connecting to the database using these tools is  usually similar.  To assist you in establishing a connection to our database the following section describes creating a connection for Microsoft Access.