Pentaho Reporting features

Which reporting solution is the best? Which tool to choose?
These are the question that all companies' managers need to answer in the beginning of firm's existence. Although the choice always depends on customer, there are more and less meaningful features that might influence on the evaluation. Checking and comparing the most important ones is necessary for distinguishing worth-interesting solutions from inappropriate ones.
In the case of Pentaho Reporting, crucial features are good enough not to denounce that we're considering a free, open source software.

The advancement of reporting algorithm is probably the strongest side of Pentaho Reporting tool. Complex system is prepared well enough to support all types of reports regardless of their destination, input data, and output format.
The ideal situation would be if every department of an enterprise were using one common reporting solution. Unfortunately, it's rather a rare situation, a possibility for reading reports from all of them is therefore very useful. And that's what Pentaho Reporting offers. Multiple data sources available help also with migrating data if the company thinks about replacing former solutions with one for all. Among many others, these are the most common data sources operable with Pentaho solutions: Pentaho Metadata and Data Integration, XML XPATH, JDBC SQL Swing TableModel, POJO, Hibernate HQL, and OLAP MDX.
These days, there's need to spread reports across more and more populous groups. All of them need reports, but each of them works in a different way using different software. Therefore it's so important to use a reporting tool supporting various output formats. Just like Pentaho Reporting. No matter whether we need Excel spreadsheets, PDF documents, XMLs or CSV files. All these (and not only them) are supported by Pentaho.
Sometimes we might need to change report's format quickly and avoid quality and form losses. The feature responsible for that is accurate formatting at the pixel level which assure that all elements stay aligned. Although it's not realizable in some cases, changes among three most popular formats (HTML, PDF and spreadsheets) do not cause any noticeable modifications in report's appearance.
The more complex reports we have to prepare the more attention we have to pay to its transparency and legibility. Thereupon, most of reports include diverse charts that are easy to embed with Pentaho Reporting tool.
All reports have to be as transparent as possible, therefore we should be provided with a possibility for defining what ranges and values we want to see. Parameterization options of Pentaho Reporting are sufficient for most uses.
People used to attach weight to the number of data included in a report. Nonetheless, the more data we have the more complex and therefore unclear the report gets. Pentaho Reporting tool supports using sub- or partial reports to relieve the main part.
If there was a one file format better than the rest, for reporting it would be XLS. Excel spreadsheets seem to be the ideal solution for presenting multiple data and information, therefore diverse reporting tools, including Pentaho Reporting, allow their users to create reports that look like spreadsheets. They usually are being called the cross tabs.
The report's lifecycle isn't over in the moment of rendering. People used to forget about its importance, nonetheless a possibility for later editing truly is useful. The interactivity of reporting provided by Pentaho tool enable end users to have an influence on reports' form, too.
Preparing a transparent report isn't simple, therefore what matter are various authoring options. Pentaho Reporting provide its users with WYSIWYG editor to make preparing reports easy as pie.
Pentaho Reporting tool is being supported with Business Intelligence Server, multiplying its functionality. Thank to that, the option of ad hoc reporting is enabled. It's all enough to understand that the best is not what you have to pay most for - all Pentaho solutions are free for all uses.
Java-origin of Pentaho Reporting makes the tool easy for extending. This, followed with open source license, make Pentaho the most easily-customizable tool in the market. We do not have to pay for any extensions as they're being spread for free. Moreover, we might easily prepare them ourselves - it's just a matter of practice and there's no system restrictions.
Business needs evolve, reporting solutions have therefore to evolve, too. Unlike any other tool, Pentaho Reporting is being incessantly developed if there was any feature missing we might predict it to be added soon.

It's been told that there are plenty of diverse reporting solutions currently accessible in the market and Pentaho Reporting is only one of them. It's been also pointed that the choice of the best one depends on each customer's needs. Nonetheless, knowing Pentaho's gratuity, we might suppose it to take place in small and medium-sized companies at most. The largest enterprises would still choose paid solutions instead, receiving a full-time professional support in return.