Examples of good IDEs to analyze for custom Form/Report designer

Question

I am working on a basic form/report designer. Some of the features i'm looking to implement are:

• Single or multiple selection of objects
• Alignment of objects (when several are selected)
• Same-sizing of objects (when several are selected)
• Moving/dragging of selected object(s)
• Selected object resizing in eight directions (using object grips)

For features and look-and-feel I've analyzed and used a mixture of ideas from:

• MS Visual Studio 200x (most useful so far)
• Visio
• Crystal Reports

My question is: Have I overlooked some other IDEs that provide these kinds of features that are better and user-friendlier examples of what to do than others i've looked at? (They don't have to be Microsoft products. That's just what i have ready access to.)

Answer 1

Perhaps you can get some more ideas from this list of reporting software. I have worked with Crystal Reports and Report Builder. Crystal reports has been good to me so far.

As for Report Builder, unlike crystal reports, its difficult to align things by eyesight. To compensate, once you select multiple objects, you can use a couple of toolbar options.

See this guide, www.digital-metaphors.com/pdf/RBuilder.pdf. Read page 101 and 102. This shows the toolbar options and explains in detail to what I am talking about. (I can only post 1 link at a time since I'm a fairly new user)

I felt that was a good way to align multiple things and be sure it's lined up correctly.

EDIT: I guess Crystal Reports had this as well in the format section. My mistake...