Cognos Analytics

We’ve got another release of Cognos Analytics and with that it means an even better dashboard authoring experience for our users.  Follow below and feel free to check out my demo on youtube as well.

You may have noticed the investment we’ve made in our Crosstab visualization over the previous 2 releases because we want our users to have an unparalleled data analysis experience which requires a powerful crosstab.  We’ve continued to enhance our crosstab in release 6 specifically with dimensional data.  When using any OLAP or dimensionally modeled relational (DMR) data source, the crosstab will now automatically add a ‘plus-sign’ object which allows the dashboard consumer to expand (or collapse) the levels defined by the hierarchy in the model.


We’ve also made a subtle change to the authoring experience related to the toolbar.  After many customer interviews we learned that some dashboard features weren’t very discoverable as they require invoked an on-demand toolbar.  As a result, we made the decision to make the toolbar persistent along the top of the canvas. The content displayed in the toolbar is contextual, dependent on what the user has selected, and it can be un-docked if preferred by clicking the un-dock button.

A larger change that we made to the authoring experience is by introducing a field mapping panel, which is invoked from the new toolbar and will open the panel until the user closes it.  This will allow authors to create or modify many visualizations more quickly without having to open and close focus mode for each visualization to make a change.

This has meant that we’ve been able to re-purpose focus mode for dashboard consumers.  Now consumers can open focus mode for visualizations which acts as a zoom for that selection and the visualization will expand into full screen on the canvas.  This makes examining smaller visualizations a little bit easier on the eyes.

And finally, we’ve included a feature to add custom unit formatting as a label for measures. From the formatting menu, authors can now enter a unit label for their measures as either a prefix or a suffix which will be applied to the visualization.