Welcome to creating a simple dashboard
in Cognos Analytics. After watching this video, you'll be able to create simple dashboards in
Cognos Analytics, use different
methods for creating visualizations in
Cognos Analytics, and configure
interactive filters within a Cognos
Analytics dashboard. In this demonstration,
we'll create a simple dashboard
in Cognos Analytics. Let's start by selecting
the data set on the My Content tab of
the content section. In the tool bar we
choose to create a dashboard and now we're going to select the
relevant dashboard template. We'll choose this one which has four small panels across the top and a large
panel at the bottom. Then we click "Create" to get
started on our dashboard. Please note that as the data is uploaded during the
import process, the usage property for each
data item is set according to the type of data
that the query items represent in the data source. However, we can change
this if required. In the case of order number, we'll change the usage property from a measure to an identifier. Now we can start to create
some visualizations. First, let's see how to create visualizations
automatically. From the data source
pane on the left, you choose a data item on
which you want to develop a visual and then drag it
onto the Canvas template. In our case, we'll drag
sales to the top left panel. Notice that when
dragging an item, we need to ensure that the square with the
double-headed arrow has turned blue in the destination template panel
before we drop it. Next, we can determine the
number of orders that we've had by counting the number
of order ID's we have. In this case, Cognos
Analytics has determined that the best visualization style for this identifier is a table. However, we can see if there are any other recommended
visualizations. In this case, there aren't any suggestions
other than table. But we know we want to
turn this into a summary, so we can just manually
select that from the list. Next up, let's look at
the quantity ordered, which we'll place
in the third panel and we'll finish with
determining the average sale. To do this, we'll drag
sales onto the canvas, into the fourth small panel. But then we'll change our summarization
from sum to average. Just like that. We now have a few key performance
indicators or KPI's, to be able to monitor and track. The other way we can start to create visualizations
is to select the specific
visualization that we want and then drag
it onto our canvas. In this case, we're
interested in looking at our sales across the
world based on countries. We'll drag country to the locations field under
regions in the right-hand pane. As we said, we want to take a look at sales across
these countries, so we drag sales to the location color
field on the right. This will update
our visualization to show the sum of
sales by color. We can manually resize our visualization to make it as big or as small as we want. As we extend the object, we can see labels that
show us the percentages of the canvas real estate that the visualization will use up. We'll make this map
visualization use approximately 50% of
the template's width. Each visualization we use has several properties
that we can configure, including settings
for the legend, the chart, and the
layers for regions, points latitude and longitude. The final way that we'll
demonstrate how to create visualizations in
Cognos Analytics is through the assistant. We can see that the
currently loaded dataset is already mentioned in
the assistant panel on the right hand side, we can either ask one of
the example questions by typing directly into
the ask a question box. Or we can click the
suggest questions link in the assistant text box
below to get insights. This will offer up some insights that we may not have
been thinking about. In this case, we'll keep
it simple and we'll just ask which deal size
has the most sales? With a single click
we're now presented with the visualization as well as alternatives based on
that visualization, such as a horizontal bar chart, a scatter plot, and
a bubble chart. Once we've decided which
visualization we like, we simply drag it onto
our canvas and it now becomes a visualization
alongside the others. We can resize it as we did
for the other visualization. Dashboards in Cognos Analytics are designed and intended
to be interactive. If we just click one of the bubbles in our deal
size visualization, we can see that all the data in the other visualizations
get updated accordingly, specifically for the
selected sector, medium deal size in this case. If we click a different
sector, such as large, all the visualizations update to reflect that sector instead. Another way we can show interactivity is
by using filters. Suppose we were interested
in the status of our orders, we could take a
particular field, in this case status and
either drag it into all tabs or into this tab so it only affects
this particular tab. Now, with this we can choose
one or multiple options. However, in this case, we only want to see
how many orders we have in the on-hold status. As before, all of the other
data visualizations have been updated to reflect
only the orders that are in an on-hold status. It looks like from a
worldwide perspective, we only have holds in a couple of countries which
is positive news. In the next video, we'll
delve deeper into a few of the more advanced
capabilities of dashboards in Cognos Analytics. In this video, you
learn that you can select from several different
dashboard template layouts. You can change the
usage properties of data attributes in
your data source pane. You can generate dashboard
visualization by dragging data fields onto
your dashboard canvas. You can also create
visualizations by selecting visualization styles
from the menu and dragging them
onto the canvas. You can use the
assistant to offer data insights and
create visualizations. Dashboards in Cognos Analytics are interactive by design and provide filters and
real-time updates to enhance the
dashboard experience.