Pentaho and Designing Reports

I've spent a few weeks playing with the Pentaho Report Designer 3.5 and 3.6M2.

The idea was to replace some existing Excel pivot table 'complex' reports with web-enabled simple versions.
The Report Designer is a pretty user friendly tool.
My one issue is the regular pauses while the tool polls the query.
Actually it is a quite frustrating issue as no-one else on the forums seemed to suffer from similar.

Upon further investigation, I can see that we need to give our users more power.
I started to look at Pentaho Metadata and then Pentaho Analysis Reports/Mondrian.

Over the past week I have spent playing with the Schema Editor, Mondrian and OLAP.
This is the good stuff. Where there is always initial reluctance to use something new, Pentaho Analysis Reports is probably much better than Excel Pivot tables and should easily pacify the converted user. After all they can still export their data to many forms including Excel.

Actually, I am really impressed by and excited with Pentaho Analysis Reporting, OLAP and this sort of report design. It is fantastic stuff and I can't wait to show some analysis reports to the users.