Actuate Report Studio is a web‑based report designer for users who want to create professional‑looking reports quickly and easily. Report Studio uses existing data sources and templates to provide the data and basic layout for reports. The intuitive graphical interface enables you to quickly format and rearrange data, sort, group, and filter data, and create computed columns and aggregate data. You can also add charts to visually present the data in your BIRT design. As you edit and format a report, you can instantly preview the changes you make using 50 rows of sample data. You can modify this number to view up to 200 rows of sample data in Report Studio. When you run the BIRT design, Actuate Viewer displays the report with actual data.

Report Studio is customizable, enabling an administrator to integrate custom data sources and templates for users to create reports. Additionally, the administrator can customize the user interface and show or hide functionality to tailor Report Studio to meet your organization’s business intelligence requirements.

This guide describes how to use the features available in the default installation of Report Studio. The functionality available to you can differ based on how your system administrator configures and customizes Report Studio.

BIRT designs are XML files designed specifically for web use. Report Studio enables you to create a variety of BIRT designs, such as detail table designs, summary table designs, or cross tab designs, based on your data visualization and business intelligence needs. Each BIRT design consists of a table displaying the data fields you select. A detail design displays the data fields retrieved from an available data source, based on any conditions you specify. A summary table design displays aggregate data for the data fields retrieved from a data source. Aggregate calculations occur at the data set level, improving response time when a large amount of data is involved. In a cross tab design, each cell contains an aggregate value, displayed in a row‑and‑column matrix facilitating additional analysis of the data.

Once you know what kind of BIRT design you need, you can immediately start creating it. The following section provides an overview of the process to create a BIRT design.