Introduction to the viewing environments
You can view BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools) reports using two viewing environments - the BIRT Viewer and BIRT Interactive Viewer. In this document, the term viewers, refers to both the BIRT Viewer and BIRT Interactive Viewer (Interactive Viewer). A report is a category of documents that presents formatted and structured content from one or more data sources, such as a database, a spreadsheet, or a text file. Figure 1-1 shows a simple listing report displaying credit limit information for customers, arranged by country.
Figure 1-1 An example reportThis section describes the viewers and highlights the capabilities and functions of the BIRT Viewer and Interactive Viewer. You use the viewers to navigate a report, print report data, save modified reports, and export the report and report data to other formats. In addition, Interactive Viewer as its name suggests, provides a high degree of interactivity. Users can easily modify the layout and formatting of reports, organize report data by sorting, filtering and grouping, perform calculations and compute report data, and edit graphical representations of report data by modifying charts in a report. Detailed information on performing each of these tasks is available in later sections of this document.