The BIRT team is pleased to announce the availability of version 4.2.  This release features many enhancements including support for Maven, an OSGi or POJO based runtime, a new report item that supports relative time periods which allows cubed data to be aggregated and displayed across 13 different periods, including Previous N Year, next NPeriods and Trailing NPeriods.  In addition BIRT now supports a donut style chart with configurable inner radius, Excel data source support allowing XLS and XLSX files to be used within a report, and better cache control on data sets.   To find out more on what is available check out the New and Notable for BIRT 4.2.

The BIRT team is always looking for feedback and participants.  To get involved in the project take a look at the BIRT Community page.

I have sympathy and respect to BIRT for its free, yet commercial-quality report designer.

No trial periods, no premium packages, it is just free. And it really works. And that's why I choose BIRT where I can.

Congratulations on the new release.

Hi Jason,

Currently (AFAIK at least), BIRT doesnt support exporting of charts to excel format - a blank box is exported. Has this been addressed yet?

I think you can supply a custom emitter to make it work, but would be nice if it worked without the need for extra components.....