I'd like to be able to look at the sales for a product over a period of time, which is something that I can't easily do with the Viart orders report, unless I pull a report for each day or week and input results into Excel - which is way too time consuming and klugy.
 
Does anyone use a third party application to do reporting, like Navicat or Smart Report Maker? Are there any decent low cost or free options out there?
 
Thanks for your answers and suggestions.

I am using Navicat and think it's wonderful. Try the 30 day free trial. They do have a free version of the software, too, but it lacks all the graphical query builder features (I'm not that great at building SQL queries so I need the graphical interface)
 
I also tried SQLyog but I found it confusing. There is also free one I think called Heidi, but it has more plans than features at this point.
 
Navicat is $79US to download. For me it finally gave a glimpse into ViArt and my other databases that I have really needed. You do of course have to show 2 or more tables for most queries in the graphical interface, and experiment with easy-to-connect id_field links, and figure out how ViArt (or whoever) related their tables. It's a lot like microsoft access.
 
Navicat has several tricks (tunneling, etc.) to connect with mysql on almost any server, but you may need to play with this a bit. Once you make the connection it's beautiful, click on any table it immediately displays like excel. or build a query graphically and click for an excel-style view. Good export features too.
 
One thing you can do to avoid spending anything right now. I built several queries with the 30 day trial graphical version, and they all opened fine in the free version when it expired. The queries can still be changed, but in the free version you have to edit it directly.
 
One irony... I used the SQLyog manual to help me figure out what I was missing in Navicat to make the initial connection from my computer.
 
Good luck if you try it!
Greg

We built our own PHP reporting tool with charts, etc. I put up a demo version last year but there were not too many takers.