An Evaluation of Pentaho's Report Designer

Pentaho's Report Designer was analyzed by downloading and installing Report Designer, Metadata Editor, Schema Workbench and the BI (Business Intelligence) Server as recommended in the Evaluating Pentaho Reporting document.

The greatest strength and greatest weakness of Pentaho's Report Designer arise from the open source software platform it is built on. The software is free and can be supported and developed by your own in-house software team. Once implemented, the software can be tailored to fit your business intelligence needs. However, the vast disadvantages outweigh the limited benefits of using Pentaho's open source software. While the software is both powerful and adaptable, it is also very difficult if not impossible to use without training and thus users will be unable to take immediate advantage of the product. If you are interested in professional training you will need free time enough to fly to Florida, California, or Washington DC for a predetermined three day period. In addition to airfare, you will pay anywhere from $2,000 to $2,500 per course for classroom training. Even Pentaho's basic web-based training sessions only occur once a month and cost $300 per course, a total of $1,200 for their full recommended four course training. In fact, Pentaho expects users to purchase their full BI Suite Enterprise Edition as evidenced in the BI Suite Enterprise Edition informational document which says "going it alone with free BI software not only increases your risk of failure, but turns out to be more expensive." Overall it seems choosing to implement this free software certainly carries a hefty price tag.

To obtain the software the user must download four different installation files totaling around 240 MB. Your only available reference from this point on is the Evaluating Pentaho Reporting user guide available on Pentaho's website. The user guide provides a series of basic tutorials demonstrating the features Report Designer has to offer. Unfortunately the sample document used in collaboration with the guide is nowhere to be found and users are forced to either read through the example or experiment with their own data. Using your own data in an attempt to keep pace with the tutorial proves difficult, but you can achieve a general feel for how Report Designer is meant to work around your data. The guide goes on to demonstrate how users can place and manipulate variables, text objects, and even graphics such as company logos. Evaluating Pentaho Reporting also introduces users to several of Report Designer's Wizards, interfaces that walk users through a series of steps in order to complete a sequenced task. While these wizards serve a significant purpose in helping non-technical users set up and use Report Designer, their sophisticated design makes them more of a hindrance than a welcome aide. Although the Evaluating Pentaho Reporting document can aide you in learning the basics of Report Designer, it ultimately leaves users unprepared and incapable of successfully creating their own reports.

Report Designer features an original user interface designed to give users maximum control over the data they wish to report. Pentaho recommends using their Report Design Wizard to create the basis for your reports, but several different aspects of the wizard create more problems than they solve. The first step lets you name your report and select a base template, but the template pictures are so small you cannot see details on them. Additionally, attempting to use the Preview button to get an idea of what the templates look like does not work either. The second step of the wizard connects Report Designer to your data source. Report Designer supports JNDI and OLAP databases as well as XML files. If you have your data source administration information available connecting to a server is simple, otherwise you will need to track down your connection strings, user names and passwords. Once you are connected you can either code your own query or use the Query Design Wizard to generate a query for your server. Seeing as how most business professionals are not expert coders, the obvious choice here is to use the Query Design Wizard to generate your SQL, MDX or Xquery statement. An attempt to use the Query Design Wizard reveals another poorly designed aspect of Report Designer. By dragging and dropping tables listing the columns of the information in your data source, you connect the variables coinciding between these tables in order to pull relative information into your report. This step sounds complicated because it is, and the demonstration in the user guide fails to teach users how to properly use Query Design Wizard.

The third step of Report Design Wizard is meant to aide users in designating the rows and columns of their report. This awkward interface has users select the data for their columns (selections) and rows (groups) by moving these variables into different lists. The Preview button gives users an idea of what their report will look like, but in practice the Previews end up being used as an inconvenient guess-and-check method to correctly establish the rows and columns of your report. The final page gives users formatting tools for their variables. The layout of these tools is unlike any other formatting palette and again users are left to figure things out on their own. The guide makes note of how you can apply operators like SUM, AVG, MIN and MAX to your data, but contains no information on how to implement these functions into your report. Overall it is apparent that while the Report Design Wizard is intended to let new users quickly and easily generate reports, the complicated and unintuitive design makes it a frustrating and useless tool Report Designer offers.

The Design Tab was created to give users maximum control over the information they wish to streamline in their reports and is where the formatting and editing of your data takes place. Although the Design Tab is a powerful tool, it is built more like a development environment than a basic word processing and editing tool. In fact, Pentaho claims the layout of Design Tab is "similar to that of other graphic design and layout tools", not a familiar environment like Microsoft Word. Rather than layout a simple document where you can place your variables as desired, the Design Tab has different sublevels for your Pages, Reports and Groups. While it is useful to have access to different sublevels all in one interface, most users would prefer to see a basic page layout so they can understand the layout of their report. The Item Band section automatically iterates the variables from your data source and generates a complete listing of the information being retrieved. Placing variables in the Item Band makes it easy to generate a report, but meticulous detail needs to be spent placing and managing variables as any overlapping or inconsistencies will be noticeably visible in your final report and can produce errors which prevent your report from running.

Three editing and formatting windows are placed into the Design Tab to helps users access and manipulate their data. The Palette window on the left side lets you place fields for labels and variables, but not the variables themselves. It's strange how you can place dummy variables from the Palette window considering if you select your data source in the Structure window it lets you directly drag and drop your variables. The Structure window on the right side displays the hierarchy of your report and allows you to select individual objects and variables from your data source. Once you have selected an object or variable its properties appear in none other than the Properties window. The Properties window gives you advanced control over the format of your variables, but lays out your options in a disorganized manor inconsistent with familiar formatting and editing tools. Only after playing around with the options in the Properties window do you gain a decent understanding of their capabilities.

The Preview Tab generates a sample document of the report you are creating. You have the option of generating your preview in PDF, HTML, RTF, XML or CSV formats. The Preview Tab runs slow but is invaluable for ensuring every aspect of your report is the way you desire. However, when it comes time to generate your document, Report Designer again leaves users out on a limb. Although you can preview reports in multiple formats, Report Designer only generates reports in a format only it can open. Business Intelligence software must be adaptable and compatible with a broad range of large corporations and small startups, and Report Designer fails to meet the expandable needs of these customers.

Despite the broad range of capabilities Pentaho brings to the table, Report Designer is far more complicated than most end-users would prefer and in fact feels more like a technical design application than a business intelligence tool. Although a few features found in familiar word processors have been integrated, users must learn to navigate new menus and wizards in order to accomplish simple tasks they already know how to do in Microsoft Word and Excel. Connecting to data sources is far more complicated than it needs to be, and generating queries for your databases is something better left to automatic software. When you have established access to your data, you'll waste time formatting and editing your variables in the many different sublevels of the Design Tab. Finally, although the Preview Tab allows you to preview your report in several different formats, running your report generates a document only Report Designer can read. Overall, Report Designer's problematic design makes it undesirable reporting software for business professionals.