Sun Report Builder: Better reporting in OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org Base is
undoubtedly a powerful database application, but when it comes to its
built-in reporting engine, words like "underpowered" and "outdated"
come to mind. Fortunately, you don’t have to put up with this situation
any longer: with the Sun Report Builder (SRB) extension, you can add nifty reporting features based on Pentaho reporting engine — assuming you can figure out how to use it without any help.
Pentaho develops top-notch open source business intelligence and
reporting tools. The new Report Builder is the first fruit of a
collaboration between Sun and Pentaho announced a few months ago. While the first incarnation of the report builder is not as powerful as Pentaho’s own reporting tools,
it’s still a huge improvement over the existing reporting feature. The
only fly in the ointment is that Sun Report Builder works only with
OpenOffice.org 2.3 or higher, so users of older versions must upgrade
the office suite to take advantage of the new tool.
Since SRB is distributed as an .oxt package, you can install it as a
conventional OpenOffice.org extension. To do this, download the latest
sun-report-builder_x.x.x.oxt package, launch OpenOffice.org, and choose
Tools -> Extension Manager. Select the My Extensions section and
press the Add button. Select the downloaded extension, press OK, and
restart OpenOffice.org.
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