Interesting article regarding the use of Excel to aid reporting from CRM.

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/excelbased-reporting-from-hosted-crm-64665

CRM systems may have built in reporting but chances are they will always have limitations as that is not where the investment will have been made because it’s the user interface that will sell the system, not the back end report generator.

We always advocate the use of Excel in conjunction with Act! as Act! produces an Excel Pivot report which allows you to ‘slice and dice’ as you wish – but remember the data must be there in the first instance and it needs to be structured.