With 11.2.3, Cognos Analytics with Watson Dashboards has pushed the envelope around filtering, visualizations, and administration. From a usability standpoint in 11.2.3, we focused on improvements to filtering, visualizations and administration.
Filtering:
We have introduced two enhancements to further enable our users when it comes to filtering in Cognos Dashboards.
First, we are really excited to announce we’ve added Cascading Filters to Dashboards in 11.2.3! Essentially, cascading filters enable values selected from one filter to scope available values in another if they are part of a cascading set. One example you can see below is selections in “Year” and “Genre” cascading to show only relevant values in “Studio” based on those selections. Another example could be cascading selections from “Country” to the relevant values in “City”.
With 11.2.3, you can cascade in either “First-to-Last”, based on order of the cascading set in the filter dock, or “Multidirectional” paradigms. Users can create one cascading set within the “All Tabs” filter dock and one within “This tab” dock for each tab. In addition, we have implemented properties to cascade filters from “All tabs” to “This Tab” as well as “This Tab” to “Local” filters in visualizations of a given tab. There’s a lot of power in this implementation and we hope to enhance it further to support more cascading sets and other use cases.
Next, we introduced a new Filter Dropdown visualization to provide more intuitive on-canvas filters. Filter Dropdowns are flexible from a size and property standpoint allowing you to alter the in-line verbiage, selection paradigm (single vs. multiple) and more!
Visualizations:
Regarding visualizations in 11.2.3 we’ve added three enhancements to improve the overall usability and intuitiveness of Cognos Dashboards.
First, we have added a Data Tool Tip to Dashboard visualizations in the Fields panel. Users can now add additional data items from their data source to further inform the tool tip appearing when hovering over a given visualization. This additional data does not have to be visually present in the visualization as a column or row to render as a Data Tool Tip.
Next, we enhanced the crosstab visualization in 11.2.3 in two major ways. First is the ability to support a values-only crosstab. With this enhancement, users can now utilize the Value field in a crosstab on its own to have a table-like experience.
In addition to Value-only crosstabs, in this release we have improved the pivot-ability of the crosstab now allowing users to move Value field data to render as row headers within the visualization. This is a powerful capability and requires there to be at least 1 column in Columns field, at least 1 column in Rows field and at least 2 columns in Values field.
The final major enhancement to visualizations in 11.2.3 relates to the zooming experience in bar charts, line charts and area charts. Users can now enable a Zoom Bar via the visualization property panel to better control horizontal and vertical zoom within a visualization. We are excited to introduce this feature and hope to extend this capability to other visualizations in the future.
Administration:
Finally, in terms of dashboard administration, we have added Package-level permissions that can be set to limit users’ ability to create or edit a dashboard and/or an Exploration built off packages. This further enables more finite control for administrators over their data.
There’s a lot to love about Cognos Analytics with Watson 11.2.3 and we on the team are incredibly excited to get this in your hands as we work on the 11.2.4 and beyond!
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