Hi,

Two comments on the report criteria date fields (staritng / ending dates):

1) The validation that checks if the starting date is after the ending date is triggered when moving between the fields. Often I'll run a report several times with different date ranges and I'll usually enter the new starting date first. If it's a newer date than the previous ending date, it triggers the error message when I try to tab into the ending date field. It would be better if it waited until you clicked the Go button before validating input as that would signal that you are truly done editing and it's ok to check it now before generating the report.

2) The auto-popup calendar is cool, but not necessarily convenient. For applications where you aren't sure which day a date falls on or when you want to pick a date based on the day of the weel (like ordering flowers, etc.), a popup calendar selector is quite useful. For sales reporting, I usually have the date range in my head and don't need to reference the calendar (for example, 6/1/09 to 6/30/09 or 1/1/08 to 12/31/08). And unfortunately, just entering the fields causes the calendar to popup and get in the way, when all I want to do is type in the date manually, which is often quicker especially if you want dates from different months or across years, which is more cumbersome to select using the popup calendar control. So wnenever I print a report with date criteria, I'm forced to press Esc to dismiss the calendar control after it automatically pops up so I can manually enter the date(s) I want more quickly.

Since you have the calendar icon next to the fields to trigger to the calendar as needed, why not just let the user trigger the calendar using that icon rather than assuming he'lll always want to use the calendar control to select report dates?

3) Not annoyances, but a couple of enhancement suggestions:
a) Add a pre-set list of date ranges for date reports that can be selected, such as "Month to date" (or "current month"), Year to date, Last Year, This Year, 1st Quarter, 2nd Quarter, etc. MS Money has these date range selection options and they are very useful for these types of sales/accounting reports.
b) Add a way to save off "Favorite" reports with their last-used settings. I'll bet most vendors have three or four favorite reports that they always run the most, and probably quite often with the same settings (month-to-date sales, year-to-date sales summary, expected recurring sales for the next 4 months, etc.). If we could save off a list of our top 5 or 6 favorite reports with custom settings so they'd be easily accessible all the time, that would be very useful.

Thanks!