Welcome to advanced capabilities in Cognos Analytics dashboards. After watching this video, you'll be able to
create calculations in Cognos Analytics dashboards use navigation paths to drill
down deeper into your data, exclude data points
from visualizations, and set top and bottom
filters on visualizations. To get started using these
advanced capabilities, we need to select a dataset
and create a dashboard. Then we select an appropriate
dashboard template. Here we'll choose the 2
by 2 dashboard template. We need to change the
usage property for the order number attribute from a measure to an identifier. In the data source pane on the left under navigation paths, right-click the data file
and select calculation. Cognos dashboards can create calculations like in
applications such as Excel. When you create a calculation
you need to give it a name. In this case, we'll
call it margin. Calculations comprise
several components, filters, data, and functions. If we open the functions list, we can see they are categorized
into different sections, such as operators, summaries, constants and types
of functions. We can start typing
a formula to create a calculation and Cognos Analytics will
offer suggestions, or we can drag and drop the required attributes
for the calculation. In this case, we are interested in calculating our margin by calculating our MSRP minus the price we sell each unit for. We can either drag and
drop the attributes directly from the left
pane or we can start typing the attributes
name and Cognos Analytics will find it for us and then we select it from the
suggestion list. Then we can build our
calculation using either method, including any
required operators, in this case, the minus sign. Now that we've created
this calculation, it's added to the list of data attributes in
the data source pane on the left and treated the same as any other fields
we have here. We can drop margin and product line onto our
dashboard canvas. Let's expand this panel to
see the data more clearly. In this case, we see that
trains is not doing well. In fact, it's actually a
negative margin for us. Now we may want to drill into this issue a
little bit more. We can create what's
called a navigation path. We can choose any field from our data to drill
up and down on. In this case, we want to start with product
line and we'll probably want to see customers and if there are
specific orders. We now have a new
navigation path in the data source pane. We can right-click on trains
and start to drill down. In this case, we can see a few offenders with a negative margin when
we look at this field, like the Mini Gifts company. Let's drill down
a little further. Here, we can see that while they have one order that
has a positive margin, the other three orders
margins are in the negative. Before we look at
the exclude feature, we need to drill
back up as we are currently drilled
down on trains. Let's collapse the view in this panel to see all the
dashboard panels again. Now we'll drag sales status and product line onto
our dashboard canvas. Notice that we are still
filtered on trains only. We can click trains
again to turn off that filter and show all
our product line items. Let's expand this
second panel to see the data more clearly again. Here we can see that
our shipped status is dramatically impacting
this visualization. To better view all
our other statuses, we can exclude the shipped
items from this visualization. Now we have a better
view of what is happening with those
other statuses. Let's collapse the
view in this panel to see all the
dashboard panels again. Now we'll illustrate
another advanced feature called top or bottom filters which might be used in
situations where we want to focus only on the most
crucial data points. Particularly in cases where
we have a large dataset. We'll drag the sales
and customer name attributes to a blank quadrant in our canvas to show this. Let's expand this panel to
see the data more clearly. To use the top or
bottom filter feature, we right click on the sales attribute and choose
top or bottom. This lets us choose the X number of top or bottom
values in our data, with the default
setting being 10. As a result, we can
quickly identify and analyze the top 10 customers based on their sales figures. The visualization
has been updated to show us our top 10 customers. One last thing we'd like to
show you is that we can use Cognos Analytics to instantly
generate infographics. Let's collapse the
view in this panel again to see all the
dashboard panels. As an example, if we're
working with the sales data, we can open the widgets menu, choose an appropriate shape, such as a piggy bank, and then drop it on the sales visualization in the canvas. With this simple action, we can transform our data
into an engaging infographic, making our data visualization
informative and memorable. In this video, you learn
that you can create calculations in Cognos
Analytics dashboards. You can drill down into
your data and create navigation paths for
detailed data exploration. You can exclude certain
data points from your visualizations to focus
on other areas of interest. You can set top
or bottom filters for advanced data analysis and you can generate instant infographics to enhance
your data visualizations.