Cognos Report Studio is widely used for creating and managing business reports in medium to large companies. It is simple enough for any business analyst, power user, or developer to pick up and start developing basic reports. However, when it comes to developing more sophisticated, fully functional business reports for wider audiences, report authors will need guidance.

This book helps you understand and use all the features provided by Report Studio to generate impressive deliverables. It will take you from being a beginner to a professional report author. It bridges the gap between basic training provided by manuals or trainers and the practical techniques learned over years of practice.

This book covers all the basic and advanced features of Report Authoring. It begins by bringing readers on the same platform and introducing the fundamental features useful across any level of reporting. Then it ascends to advanced techniques and tricks to overcome Studio limitations.Develop excellent reports using dimensional data sources by following best practices that development work requires in Report Studio. You will also learn about editing the report outside the Studio by directly editing the XML specifications.

Provide richness to the user interface by adding JavaScript and HTML tags. The main focus is on the practical use of various powerful features that Report Studio has to offer to suit your business requirements.

Learn techniques and hacks to make the best out of your Cognos 8 Report Studio

What you will learn from this book

• Learn basic and advanced options around sorting, filtering, and aggregation of data
• Explore the powerful features of Report Studio-Conditional Formatting, Cascaded Prompts, Master-Detailed queries, and more
• Achieve real business demands such as dynamic drill-though links, showing tooltips, minimum column width, prompt manipulation, and merged cells
• Learn to edit reports outside Report Studio using XML editing
• Develop sophisticated printer friendly reports
• Overcome tool limitations such as row level formatting, timing report execution, handling missing images, and so on
• Learn tips on report development time
• Introduce best practices such as inserting comments, regression testing, and version controlling in your reports
• Enhance the features of Report Studio by using macros
• Work with dimensional models (DMRs and Cubes)

Approach

Written in cookbook style, this book offers learning and techniques through recipes. It contains step-by-step instructions for Report Studio 8 users to author effective reports. The book is designed in such a way that you can refer to things chapter by chapter, and read them in no particular order.

You will see a new fictional business case in each recipe that will relate to a real-life problem and then you will learn how to crack it in Report Studio.

Who this book is written for

If you are a Business Intelligence or MIS Developer (programmer) working on Cognos Report Studio who wants to author impressive reports by putting to use what this tool has to offer, this book is for you. You could also be a Business Analyst or Power User who authors his own reports and wants to look beyond the conventional features of Report Studio 8.

This book assumes that you can do basic authoring, are aware of the Cognos architecture, and are familiar with Studio.