Supported local file formats

If you want to do some quick analysis and visualizations with local data files, you can upload the files into a project and use them as data sources in Cognos Dashboards.

Your data files must meet the following size and structure requirements:

  • The maximum supported file size is 1 GB.
  • The data in the files must be in a simple columnar format. Pivot tables or crosstabs are not supported.

You can upload the following file types into Cognos Dashboards:

Microsoft Excel workbook files

The supported Cognos® Excel file formats include .xls and .xlsx workbook files.

All worksheets in a multi-tab workbook are uploaded simultaneously. Each worksheet appears as a separate table in Cognos Dashboards.

The following conditions apply to uploaded Microsoft Excel files:
  • .xlsx files that are saved in OpenOffice are not supported.
  • .xlsb and .xlsm files are not supported.
  • Password-protected Excel files are not supported.
  • Filters in Excel files are ignored. You can use the filtering options in the dashboards to reapply the filters.
  • Comments before the first header row are interpreted as column headers.

    Text before the first row that describes the worksheet is incorrectly read as a column header. If you need a description of the worksheet, leave an empty row at the end of your data, and add the description under the empty row.

  • Totals and subtotals are treated as part of the data.

    Totals can be mistaken as unsummarized data, and give misleading results. Consider removing totals and subtotals from your data before you upload the file.

  • Each file can contain a maximum of 2000 columns.

    However, for better query performance, avoid uploading files with hundreds of columns. Try to remove redundant columns and rows from the files before you upload the files.

Comma-separated values files

The supported file extensions for comma-separated value files include .csv or .txt.

The following conditions apply to uploading delimiter-separated values files:
  • Quotation mark characters escape literal values. Single quotation marks (') and double quotation marks (") are supported.
  • Record separators separate rows. Newline (\n), carriage return (\r), and carriage return followed by newline (\r\n) are supported.
  • If your file is encoded as Unicode, it must contain a byte order mark (BOM) as the first character.
  • Each string value in a file can contain a maximum of 5000 characters. Any extra characters are truncated.
  • The date and time values in the files must be in a supported format. Otherwise, the data might not be rendered properly in visualizations. Cognos Dashboards supports the ISO 8601 standard formats for times.
    The following date formats are supported:
    • M/d/yy
    • MMM d, y
    • MMMM d, y
    • dd-MM-yy
    • dd-MMM-yy
    • yyyy-MM-dd
    The following time formats are supported:
    • h:mm a
    • h:mm:ss a
    • h:mm:ss a z
    • HH:mm
    • HH:mm z
    • HH:mm:ss
    • HH:mm:ss.SS
    • HH:mm:ss z
    • HH:mm:ss.SS z