Visualization improvements
Adding baselines to your visualizations

Report authors can add baselines to 11.1 visualizations to indicate major divisions in the data.

We’ve carefully evaluated every visualization type to determine which should be enabled to support baseline. If there is a visualization type your business requires and it’s missing from this list, please let us know. Full list of visualizations that support baseline in Cognos Analytics 11.1.7 are:
Area (river/smooth/step), Boxplot, Bubble, Scatter, Bullet, Column (stacked/clustered/floating/target), Bar (stacked/clustered/floating/target), Combination chart (stacked/clustered), Line (step/smooth), Point, Marimekko, Radar and Waterfall.

There are three types of baselines available in this release, category index, numeric value and percent on axis.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

This column visualization contains a percentage baseline at 75% of the y-axis and numeric baseline at 10million. As you can see, the baseline styles are customizable. Custom legends and captions can be used for HTML, PDF and Excel outputs.

Here is an example of using categorical index baseline:

Categorical index baseline can be used to highlight a specific data item on categorical axis. Index 1 means the line will be placed on the first data item.

New combination visualization

A combination chart that supports separate series (color by) for column/bar vs line is finally here! In reporting, you can also use separate queries to author this chart. The column/bar portion is configurable to use stacked or clustered mode and there are six different interpolation modes available on the line portion.  

We’ve also added the ability to control if separate axis should be displayed and if they should be synced.

Waterfall visualization with sub-categories

Waterfall can be used to display cumulative effect of a series of positive or negative values. Report authors can now use sub-categories in addition to display how values are aggregated at different level.

Authors can use sub-category value property to automatically calculate and display changes between each data item. Colors being used for different types of bars are also customizable. The same visualization above can be easily changed to this:

I’ve modified the colors for the first column, total column and positive columns. The overall total bar is hidden. Instead of presenting the change, the second visualization is showing actual values for each data item. Show zero origin is also enabled comparing to the first chart. This presentation may not be as nice as the first version but it’s to show the flexibility an author has.

More visualizations to support multiple measures

11.1.6 was the first release to support comparing multiple measures in a single visualization in reports. We started with column and bar charts only. I’d like to quote what I wrote in the 11.1.6 blog posting “we will enable many more visualization types in 11.1.7.” So we did.

Area, Boxplot, Hierarchical packed bubble, Packed bubble, Point, Scatter, Combination chart, Line, Pie, Radar, Treemap, Waterfall, Worldcloud. I believe this is a good list of visualizations to enable multiple measure support. If we’ve missed anything, please let us know.

Other visualization improvements

Many more visualization properties have been added to this release. Logarithmic scaling, Pie label location, label orientation, value axis range control and additional display modes for Treemaps. Please refer to our what’s new documentation online for details.

Disable OnDemand Toolbar

A new Cognos Viewer was introduced to the product in the initial release of Cognos Analytics 11. We want to bring more interactivity to report outputs for consumers, and to eliminate the need to export reports to Excel for simple sorting or filtering. Many interactive functionalities are available through what we call OnDemand Toolbar in the Viewer. However, there are customers with requirements to produce static HTML outputs. In order to satisfy this usecase, we have implemented the ability to disable OnDemand Toolbar at role level and at report level.

To disable OnDemand toolbar at role level, administrator can use the customization UI under Manage.

To disable OnDemand toolbar at the report level, report authors can modify this report property:

Run a single report page

One of the highest voted Idea under reporting is to bring back the ability to run a single report page in different formats. I can finally mark this Idea as delivered after 11.1.7.

From Pages view, report authors can pick any report page and choose to run it in any format we support.

Data table filtering

We have received lots customer feedback after the release of a new Data Table in reporting in 11.1.6. Everyone is very excited about this new JavaScript based object that’s interactive and performant. However, not all feedback are positive. The major issue comes to the usability of filter drop down list. Data table column filter drop down list allows users to quickly exclude or include data from the table. It is very easy to exclude a few rows of data but to exclude all rows can be a taunting task if your table has hundreds or thousands of rows. We didn’t have enough time to finish more features for data table in this release, but we made sure to add the option to ‘Deselect all’ in this filter drop down list.

Data set editor improvements

Data set is our method for data extraction and caching. Users can create a simple table and use it as the data source to create reports, dashboards and stories.
Simple is good but never enough. If you are an experience Cognos user, this is no news. Data set editor is based off our report editing interface. And you are likely frustrated with not able to do more query editing like what reporting offers. Query view is now added to the data set editor along with the ability to configure query properties.

We have also added the following functionalities including the ability to copy and paste reportspecs so that queries from existing reports can be reused.

When reusing a reportspec, the current data set will be overwritten by the copied over report entirely. If you just want to add queries to the existing data set, copy/paste queries from a report to data set editor is also available.