Good morning billwagnon,

It sounds like you're almost where you need to be. A couple things I would suggest as resources:

On the Sage Customer Portal if you log in and do a Knowledge base search for "Data Dictionary" it will give you an article with links to all the current data dictionaries for Sage 300 CRE. This is very helpful for building reports and queries no matter what tool you use to access the data. 

Another very good article is "How do I set up an ODBC User DSN for Accounting and Management data?" Setting up a new DSN may help resolve your ODBC call failure. One other thing that can cause an ODBC call failure is if you are using a 64 bit version of Office to try to connect to the Sage DSN driver, this is because we only supply a 32 bit driver. If you have a 64 bit version of Office installed you will need to install a 32 bit version instead. 

You may need to also review your Sage 300 CRE security to see if you have been granted ODBC access. If you are a Security and Application administrator you would have full access. If you are not an admin, it's possible there are some check boxes under the Security Administration role setup. 
If this is the case please have your security admin check your role under Tasks, ODBC to see if you have the read and write access for the tables you are trying to look up. The article "Error: Report not initialized properly. (ODBC read access)" has more instructions. 

As far as reporting tools I would not recommend using Pervasive Control Center, while it is possible to review the tables within PCC, it really is more for diagnostics and such. Access and Crystal are much better options.

Please let me know if any of this helped and if there is anything else I can assist with!

Thank you Kyle.  I am starting to make some progress!

Kyle, on other platforms (Viewpoint + SQL Server) I write stored procedures or views in order to deliver to Crystal only the data that is needed.  Is this possible with Sage CRE, or I am restricted to adding and joining tables in the Crystal Reports designer?