Yes - you are in the right frame of mind. When building reports with this kind of layout its all about dividing the report up into horizontal/vertical rows and using table and blocks.
Your specific question about the text in the prompt button. Just drag a text item inside the prompt button.
Other considerations - When you start putting multiple data containers onto a page you may need to think about the lengths of the lists. For example on list could have 10 rows, the other could have 100. By default Cognos reports do this page down thing - which can mean you need to think about what happens when you press page down.
If your lists aren't too long (less than 1000 entries) then you could use list property Rows Per page to increase this so you dont get the page down. You can also then use the Scrollable area height to give you a freeze headers effect. Like this:
Your table also looks like it has the 100% width size set, hence your lists are far apart from each other. You may want to remove that to bring the lists together.
Formatting a report is the fun bit!
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Marc Reed
Reporting Lead
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Original Message:
Sent: Fri February 14, 2025 08:26 AM
From: Greg Wilburn
Subject: Five reports or metrics on one screen
Marc,
Thanks. That's what I ended up doing. I originally created the reports separately because that's how we did it in our old BI software (create each, then place them on an HTML page).
I created single report with a 1x5 table. Dropped a list into each cell of the table. I have a separate table above with the from/to and "finish" button. I have the parameters default to the current day (which was more difficult than it should be). Odd think is I couldn't find a way to change the text on the button... I would prefer something other than "finish".
I honestly would welcome any critique - is there a "better" way?
Here's the final product:
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Greg Wilburn
Director of IT
Total Biz Fulfillment
Grantsville MD
Original Message:
Sent: Thu February 13, 2025 02:32 AM
From: Marc Reed
Subject: Five reports or metrics on one screen
The simplest way to achieve this would be to just have it all in a single report. Is there a reason why you don't think a single report is the right solution?
The output looks pretty dense in terms of stuff on the page. Dashboards can be difficult to show a lot of information on a single page. Unless you have a really wide monitor I think a dashboard would struggle to show 5 lists with this amount of columns. Purely from a design aesthetic.
There are other ways of putting multiple reports into a single page - you could have a html page, with each report being a frame in the page. There is also the new(ish) IBM BI Tool that puts loads of different BI providers into a single page. All viable - but the single report would still be my default answer.
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Marc Reed
Reporting Lead
Original Message:
Sent: Tue February 11, 2025 02:27 PM
From: Greg Wilburn
Subject: Five reports or metrics on one screen
In our previous BI application, we had a dashboard-like screen (HTML page) that displayed warehouse metrics for various workgroups for a given date range. The user could change the date range and update all 5 reports at once. All 5 reports are summarized KPIs by physical location (WHS) and user. I've included a screenshot below.
I've recreated the individual reports (lists) in Cognos and verified the accuracy. Now I'm not sure the best way to replicate what we had previously. The reports are derived from different data sources (all within my data module).
I've created a lot of reports, but no dashboards (yet). I tried using the dashboard option, but can't figure out how to present the data.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
TIA
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Greg Wilburn
Director of IT
Total Biz Fulfillment
Grantsville MD
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