I've been making pretty good use of Telerik reporting over the past couple of months. The blend of report bands (ala Crystal Reports) and tablix controls (ala SSRS) is useful.
There's one feature that I'm really missing from SSRS though - placeholders. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd207048.aspx
It brings two key benefits
1. The ability to easily mix formatting of text within a single textbox. Thus you could bold a bit of text, and in the same box, have normally formatted text.
2. Building on #1 - the ability to have multiple expressions within a single textbox.
It means that a list of names can be done as
Smith, John
Jones, Allison
Longnamen, Shorty
This natural look is quite appropriate in many listings. It could be done with string concatenation and HTML formatting but this is much more difficult than just using placeholders like
[surname], [firstname]
as we'd don in SSRS.
The least-friction way to do this in Telerik report is
Smith, John
Jones, Allison
Longnamen, Shorty
where we use two separate textboxes for surname and firstname - this leads to having to gauge how big surnames could be and then have the firstname always far enough over to avoid a collision.
Is this something you might consider for Q1 2015? I haven't thought about it too heavily but I suspect you could implement it with some work in the designer to allow entry, storage and manipulation of placeholders. In the rendering engine you could translate this to HTML formatted string concatenation.
Thoughts? :)