The BIRT Viewers enable you to export report data, report content, and elements, such as charts, cross tabs, or summary tables, to various formats. You can export data to several flat file formats that can be read by Excel. In addition, the BIRT Viewers use various emitters to enable you to export content, as well as elements to formats such as Excel, Word, PowerPoint, PostScript, and PDF.

When you export content, or elements to other formats, each emitter such as the PDF emitter or the Excel emitter provides several options that you can select to maintain the existing properties of the exported content, enabling users to easily perform additional analysis on the exported output. For example, when you export an element such as a cross tab to Excel, the Excel emitter supports exporting the content as a pivot table. This feature is specifically useful for sharing content with users without access to the BIRT Viewers, who can still analyze the output in Excel. You can also export a Flash chart to PDF format. The PDF emitter embeds the chart in the output file, retaining existing animation properties. You can modify the output file, based on the options available in that application. This section discusses the exporting options available when exporting report data or report content using the BIRT Viewers.