BIRT Reports Tutorials - Preface

In my current position, I end up having to build reports frequently. I started writing reports about 7 years ago using Crystal Reports for the HRIS that my former employer was using at the time. When I switched over from my previous position to one at the university, I discovered Actuate's BIRT reporting tool.

The fact that BIRT is free is a huge advantage. This means that not only can non profit organizations use it with minimal impact to their budget, but even stats and data analysis hobbyists like myself can try it out for personal use without the high cost barrier that comes with many of the other available solutions.

BIRT is actually a really powerful tool. I have grown to like it more than Crystal because BIRT is more open. You can practically do anything in BIRT as long as you know how to code and where to apply it. But therein lies the pitfall with BIRT too - the user interface is not as intuitive as Crystal for a novice user and the learning curve can be quite steep. You also have to know a bit of SQL, whereas in Crystal, the table linkages are right there available to you in the UI.

I'm writing this because I've also had a difficult time learning BIRT reports and the online documentation has been difficult to navigate. So in this series, I'm going to try to provide simple, easy to understand tutorials for the beginner all the way up to the level of knowledge I have acquired thus far.

In my current position, I work frequently with Assetworks AiM so I'll be using this database primarily with my instruction. So these tutorials should be especially useful to other AiM users.

I use a homegrown MySQL database for my personal hobbies and will be referring to this from time to time as well. So hopefully any of you using MySQL will find this incredibly useful as well.


Lastly, I write a lot of posts on this blog. They are based on topics that interest me but they do not always coincide with each other. This blog is my interests catchall, which is exactly why I named it what I did. So to make this blog easier to follow for my readers, I've worked hard to develop a consistent tagging system for my posts. Consequently, all BIRT report tutorials are tagged (or labeled if we are using Blogger's nomenclature) by the keyword BIRT.

And here is a screenshot on my blog of where you can click to find all posts included under this label:

Now, without further ado, let's get started!

BIRT Reports Tutorial 1 - Downloading and Installing BIRT