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I'm currently testing some functionalities in Cognos Analytics 11.

My goal is to export a report to an excel file. The report should have multiple pages, each containing a list of data and a graph visualizing the data. Currently when I do this, the visualization is exported as an image into the excel file. What I want is to have the visualization editable/customizable within excel, in such a way that if a change is made to the list of data, the visualization is updated.

Is this possible?

Sievag
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  • No. If you want that I suggest you move to Power BI. Cognos is never going to catch up to it – Nick.Mc Oct 24 '22 at 11:02
  • @Nick.McDermaid That's rather subjective. While Cognos, like any software, has its weaknesses, it has a different feature set than Power BI. There are many things Cognos Analytics does well that Power BI will never do. Plus Power BI is still in its infancy. It's changing so fast that instructions I wrote 2 months ago are no longer valid in the latest version. – dougp Dec 12 '22 at 19:19
  • You're right, it's a subjective a comment. I've used Cognos since version 5 (i.e. when it was only a thick client called PowerPlay). I build and support solutions using both Cognos and Power BI right now and I am no longer a fan of Cognos – Nick.Mc Dec 12 '22 at 23:41
  • Having said that WRT the original question, Cognos active reports are offline interactive reports but don't have any Excel functionality, and are complex to build. – Nick.Mc Dec 12 '22 at 23:43

2 Answers2

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Your question:

What I want is to have the visualization editable/customizable within excel, in such a way that if a change is made to the list of data, the visualization is updated.

Short answer: No - that is not possible.

Long answer: IBM Cognos Analytics renders exports to Excel on the server side. As you noticed, the visualizations are created before they reach Excel and are "static" according to the data flowing into them.

If you want to achieve interactivity inside Excel, you would need to program that in some Excel Macros or use Excel Native visualizations.

What you might want to explore are data modules. With IBM Cognos data modules you can upload your excel file with the changed data to the IBM Analytics Server.

See this very short technote on how to do that: https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/295345

And from there you can do all the fancy stuff that IBM Analytics Dashboards provides like interactive filtering, linking, drilling, filtering and so on and so on.

The results can be embedded in any HTML page via direct URL.

You might want to automate data upload to IBM Cognos.

Hope that helped.

Ralf R.
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It depends on which visualizations you use. The 11.1 visualizations, 11.0 visualizations, and Legacy visualizations appear to render to Excel as an image. If you use Charts (the old-school visualizations from Cognos 10 -- so, 8 years old) some or all of these will render to Excel as an Excel chart and use data on a hidden worksheet as its source. I tested this by creating a clustered column chart based on very simple data from the GO Sales (query) package. I suspect you'll also find that Charts are far more configurable than the newer visualizations.

dougp
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