After the introduction of Pentaho Reporting and an overview from twenty thousand feet, in this chapter, you will start with a practical hands-on session, learning how to run Pentaho Report Designer for the very first time. In addition, you will take your first steps in creating a report with your preferred layout, using some initial data as an example.

You will begin by setting up an environment for building reports. From there, you will walk through some initial details of the user interface, like menus, toolbars, report element palettes, report canvas tab panels, report explorer, element properties, and messages. After learning more about the user interface, you will walk through the creation of a report from scratch. At this stage, you will be using the easy wizard available in Pentaho Report Designer, to make the session more practical, you will see how to save your report in the filesystem. This will be useful to store it safely for the...