IBM Cognos 8 Reporting

Overview

IBM® Cognos® 8 Reporting gives you access to a complete list of self-serve report types, is adaptable to any data source and operates from a single metadata layer for a variety of benefits such as multilingual reporting.

With the reporting capability, you can personalize the style and quality of BI delivered to your key stakeholders, and you expand the community of BI users.

Features and benefits 

 

New features in version 8.4

  • Increased visual appeal includes new background designs and colors. Users can add gradient colors behind charts.
  • New chart types: Marimekko, Stepline, Sparkline, Sparkbar and Spark Win/Loss.
  • Report annotations: Users can add comments directly within the body of HTML-rendered reports.
  • Enhanced suppression: Suppress all types of reports against relational, dimensionally-modeled relational and OLAP sources. Also, users can also suppress rows, columns or rows and columns based on "zero" values, "divide by zero" values, missing values and overflow values.
  • Extended filters now include wildcards, range and between operations.
  • Associated frames now drill together.
  • Strategy Maps and Impact Diagrams now available as portlets that can be integrated into IBM® Cognos® Connection®, IBM® WebSphere®, and Microsoft Sharepoint portals.
  • Data lineage: Users can access and view major transformations to data as it moves through the system.
  • Expanded data access: Use data from IBM® Cognos® TM1.

More targeted information

  • Use tabbed portlet pages to navigate across multi-style, multi-page reports with critical information.
  • Use briefing books to maximize your professional report presentation with customized page orientation, horizontal pagination, multiple tables of content and personalized "no data" scenarios.
  • Schedule and burst multi-page reports to ensure that stakeholders receive relevant, consistent and timely information.
  • Save and store reports to any LAN location to save time, increase convenience and facilitate easy access to reports and information.
  • Use global filters to update the content across multiple objects in a portal page.

Complete reporting coverage

  • Allow business analysts to quickly and intuitively create and format statement-style reports with live data with the express authoring mode.
  • User interface supports 10+ languages; reports delivered in 25+ languages.
  • Multiple export formats: Excel, PDF, XML, HTML and CSV.
  • Flexible distribution methods: centralized access, email, application integration and Microsoft Office.
  • A single architecture for viewing, querying, analyzing and authoring for collaborative contributions to any report including dashboards.
  • Report against any heterogeneous data source.
  • Web-based deployment.

Advanced authoring capabilities

  • Intuitive and accessible self-service report authoring.
  • Federated queries.
  • Adaptive layout adjusts automatically when objects are added, moved or removed.
  • Embed live applications, Web sites and non-BI content within a report.
  • Drag-and-drop authoring incorporates data, text, charts, graphs and images.
  • Edit reports with prompts and toolbar commands.
  • Interactive visualizations and charting abilities.
  • Work with data using familiar business terms.
  • Use a variety of charts: crosstabs, bar/3D bar, pie/doughnut, line, gauge, funnel, scatter, dot density, waterfall and more.
  • Create complex, multi-page layouts using different data sources without programming or workarounds.
  • Conditional suppression and automatic calculations.