| OpenOffice to gain reporting functions |
Apr. 25, 2007
 OpenOffice.org and business intelligence software maker Pentaho on April 20 announced a deal to include the latter's open source reporting engine in OpenOffice.org's next feature release. "Report Designer" will serve as an extension to the free office suite's database application, "Base."
Report Designer aims to give business users the ability to create sophisticated business intelligence reports from various sources -- including OLAP and XML -- and save them using the OASIS OpenDocument format (ODF), the ISO-approved open standard for file format, among other formats.
Report Designer also outputs files in Adobe PDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, Rich Text Format, or plain text, a Pentaho spokesperson said.
(Click to enlarge)
As seen in the above screenshot, each repeating section of the report has its own area where text can be inserted. In the first release users will be able to create groups (with header and footer), functions, page header/footer, report header/footer.
"The new report designer will extend the database application," wrote database designer and OO.org team member Ocke Janssen on the OpenOffice.org engineering blog site, GullFOSS. "You then have the possibility to create reports -- not only with a wizard, but also manually.
"As output format, you have the choice between text documents or spreadsheets ... The designer uses the classical way of presenting reports. To navigate through the components of your report, you'll have a navigator ..."
All organizations use reporting in one form or another, the Pentaho spokesperson said. As a result, reporting is considered a core business intelligence (BI) need and is frequently the first such application deployed by many organizations. Pentaho reporting allows organizations to easily access, format, and distribute information to employees, customers, and partners, the spokesperson said.
Key features in Pentaho Report Designer, according to the spokesperson, include:- Flexible deployment from standalone desktop reporting, to interactive web-based reporting to enterprise business intelligence -– with a free open source alternative at every step
- Broad data source support, including relational, OLAP, or XML-based data sources
- Flexible output options, including Adobe PDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, Rich Text Format, or plain text
- Wizard-driven report design for fast, easy report creation
- Professional Edition available with additional deployment capabilities including clustering, subscriptions, directory integration, versioning, auditing, and more
OpenOffice.org released version 2.2 of its freely downloadable office suite on March 29. Based on OpenOffice.com's convention of spacing out minor releases three months apart, v2.3 should be ready for use by late June.
In addition to being immediately available for download from OpenOffice.org's download servers and mirrors, OpenOffice 2.2 is also available via BitTorrent.
For Linux, OpenOffice 2.2 is available as a compressed RPM. For both better performance and Java integration, OpenOffice.org recommends that you have the latest JRE (Java Runtime Environment) installed. It should be at least JRE 1.4. The latest JRE, Version 5.0 Update 11, is available for download in RPM format, here.
-- Chris Preimesberger
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