Using Jasper Reports
 

has anyone here used Jasper Reports? i have no idea where to start learning it. a link to a tutorial would be fine (aside from the jasper reports site, which i find too difficult to understand...)

thanks!

jasperreports is the backend which means you have to create xml file from scratch which is not fun at all. Use the front end such as ireport. Here is the tutorial:
http://ireport.sourceforge.net/docs.html

thanks, i will look into it. does anyone know of a free report-generating plugin for eclipse? jasperassistant plugin is not free. :(

i'm having problems following the tutorial on ireport http://ireport.sourceforge.net/cap4.html
i can't seem to make it work when i use a csv datasource! it always tells me "the document has no pages". can someone please help me about this... thanks

As far as I know there is not a nice jasper integration with eclipse other that jasper assistant. You can use BIRT instead: http://www.eclipse.org/birt/ :
BIRT is an open source, Eclipse-based reporting system that integrates with your application to produce compelling reports for both web and PDF.

hmm... unfortunately, this does cannot create and ouput in excel format (which is required of me).