Arena has several ways to create a "custom report". Some ways are very simple for simple cases and intended for normal people. Other ways are for more complex cases and are intended for someone who has reporting like (SQL, Access, etc) skills. Arena is integrated with MS SQL Reporting Services (RS) which means you've got the power of that tool at your disposal... if you know how to use it. Phil and I have been talking about RS for some time now, but I've never had the time/need to dive in and learn it.
Thanks to the latest Arena Administrator Guide, Google, 4 hours of mostly uninterrupted time, and my MS SQL Reporting Services for Dummies book, I was able to learn it enough to put together a demo/screencast of how to create a custom Arena report. The screencast is about 10 minutes long and takes you through the entire process of creating a fairly simple kind of interactive (lets the user provide a date range) report.
It is my intention to show our Arena admins and a few of our savvy, db-skilled ministry assistants how to create their own reports too. That will remove me as their bottleneck and free me up to do some of the more complex Arena solutioning and development that I've been itching to start.