Including charts in your Pentaho reports makes a difference because of two main reasons: it's powerful and it's easy. Pentaho charts are powerful because they give you the ability to represent complex information in a single image (the chart itself) with many different styles. They are easy because the inclusion of chart in a report can be easily done with a configuration (and not development), starting from a data source.

To add charts to your report, drag the chart icon (

) from the Report Designer palette and drop it in the place where you want to see the chart. Usually, a chart is placed in a grouping band like Report Header or Group Header (and rarely on footers or Page Header). This is because a chart makes sense if used on a collection of data and not on single...