BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> BIRT Rocks!

If you have used Excel, you probably have used and liked the convenience of Pivot Tables to automatically sort, count and aggregate data displayed in a compact row and column matrix. Pivot Tables, also known as Cross Tab(ulations), helps you to analyze data and recognize patterns in it. While BIRT has been supporting crosstabs for a long time, in version 11 Actuate has added support to interact with a crosstab table and automatically create charts using just a web browser. The tool that enables this interactivity is called BIRT Data Analyzer and it is well integrated with Interactive Viewer.

A crosstab report leverages a multi-dimensional data structure called Cube that is optimized for analysis. A cube organizes data into Measures, Dimensions & Attributes and can be stored in BIRT Document or BIRT Objects (.data file) (See my earlier blog on BIRT Objects). You can launch up a cube stored in either format for analyses in Data Analyzer, take a look at the short video recording to see it in action:


See the above video in full screen.

Data Analyzer helps you discover trends and analyze information by providing the following features:

• Add, remove or reorder attributes, dimensions and measures
  
• Drill down display detail data or drill up to display summary data
  
• Pivot the crosstab , which swaps the colums and rows
  
• Sort data
  
• Filter data
  
• Display columns or rows that show aggregate data
  
• Create a column to display calculated data
  
• Choose from several chart types to display data
  
• Export content to other formats (PDF, Excel, Word etc)

You can download the sample BIRT Object used in the recording from here. Working with Actuate BIRT Analyzer requires Actuate iServer, download an evaluation copy of Actuate iServer and give it a try.