Do reports actually make people dumber?

I write a lot of reports that output for our customers into excel. I'm starting to suspect that for many customers it doesn't actually help them, rather it might actually hurt them (also eat all my time).

If a user generates their own report via search options or etc to pull out some data, they usually SEEM to have put some thought into the actions required to find the data they want.

Accordingly:

1. They immediately know what information is there, and why some information might be excluded.

2. They can do a little trial and error to solve their own problems / better understand what is going on.

3. They're a hell of a lot less likely to insist that something is "MISSING!!!" without seeming to actually know what the thing(s) are that are missing.

With auto generated spreadsheet that shows up in the email there's just little no critical thinking outside of some stray thoughts in their head when the spreadsheet showed up ...