Hi, I am new to MRE and Report Caster, and I was wondering if there is a short tutorial on how to use these products.

I have access to the full administrator, developer and end user manuals for these technologies, but they are hundreds of pages long. I would like to learn the essentials of these technologies quickly, so I was hoping that a tutorial or summary of how to use MRE and Report Caster existed so I can quickly get up to speed on these products.

John,

I noticed no one has replied to this. That's probably because none of us know of any way to learn any IBI product quickly. Here's the best I can offer:
Get printed copies of the manuals. You can order them, but you can also download them at IBI's tech support site (http://techsupport.informationbuilders.com/). You will need a login ID. Hopefully, someone at your company has one, if you don't. Any IBI rep could guide you through getting one.
That's the easy part. The hard part is reading them. They aren't exactly exciting. But try reading them cover to cover. Don't worry about memorizing them. Just get some idea of the kinds of things you can do. When you encounter a need, maybe you will remember that you saw something about that. You can also highlight those things you think merit attention and do subsequent reads, attending only to highlighted items.
Ok, maybe that isn't the hard part. The hard part really is just fumbling your way through the dark, looking for solutions to real-world problems. Because, really, the manuals often offer something more akin to hints than solutions. From your perspective, I think the problem here is that acquisition of functional knowledge of the products requires both effort and time. Sounds like time isn't something you have, but I frankly don't know of any shortcuts.

Well ... you can try to read the manuals, or you can get some training.

I think that taking the MR administration class is worth a day of time.

Then again, as a former instructor, I may be biased.