Assistant capabilities

The Assistant is a powerful feature that allows you to ask questions in natural language. This topic demonstrates some of the commands that you can use with the Assistant.

Ask questions using natural language. For example, show Profit is synonymous with list Profit, what is Profit?, tell me about Profit, and Profit.

Here are some commonly used questions to get you started:
help
Displays overview and general usage information.
show data
Lists all supported data sources that you have access to in My content and Team content. Supported data sources include:
  • Uploaded files (csv, tsv, xls, xlsx, and zip)
  • Data modules
  • Data set
  • Framework Manager packages
    Note: See Enriching packages in the Managing document.

When results exceed the number of displayed items, click More to view up to 100 data sources. Scroll to the bottom of the list and click Less to collapse the list.

show source <source-name>

Displays a list of relevant fields and details for the specified data source. The toolbar displays the <source-name> that is in context. By default, Cognos Analytics uses the active source in your dashboard or exploration panel. From the results, you can click field names to obtain more information for those particular fields. Clicking field names is equivalent to asking show column <column-name>.

When results exceed the number of displayed items, click More to view up to 100 data sources. Scroll to the bottom of the list and click Less to collapse the list.

show column <column-name>
For the specified column, information and related fields are displayed. Clicking the related fields is equivalent to asking show chart <column1> and <column2>. If the specified column is determined to have influencers, you can enter what influences <column-name> to see its list of influencers.
what influences column <column-name>
Displays a list of fields that influences the results in the specified column.
show chart <column1> and <column2>
Displays visualizations that show the relationship between <column1> and <column2>. Scroll through the visualizations by clicking the left and right arrows. Each visualization includes an information icon in the upper-right corner. Hover over the icon to see descriptions about the underlying data. You can optionally enter more columns, but excessive columns can result in less effective visualizations.

Clicking Show related visualizations returns visualizations based on influential and related fields.

Clicking Create dashboard from the charts creates a new dashboard based on the most recently generated charts. Typing Create related dashboard produces the same resulting dashboard. If the charts contain top or bottom aggregations, these modifiers are applied to the generated dashboard.

Applying aggregations and filters can help to add focus and create more compelling visualizations. Common aggregations include total, average, count, maximum/minimum, top/bottom, best/worst, and so on. Here are a few aggregation examples:
show top <num> <column1> by <column2>
Displays the top values from <column1> based on the context of <column2>. For example, show top 5 Sales by Region. If <num> is not specified, a default value of 10 is used.

<column1> is an aggregated or non-aggregated measure, while <column2> is a categorical column.

show average <column-name>
Displays the average for all values found in <column-name>.
how many <column-name>
If <column-name> is a category, the number of distinct items is returned. If <column-name> is a measure, the sum total is returned.
show maximum <column-name>
Displays the highest value found in <column-name>.
show minimum <column-name>
Displays the lowest value found in <column-name>.
show total <column-name>
Displays the sum total for all values found in <column-name>.

You can add filters for geographical strings (such as Country or State) or temporal strings (such as Month or Year). Filtering by date is not supported, at this time. Aggregations and filters can be combined to produce more granular results. Here are some examples, based on sample data:

  • show Education by Income where Income is less than 1000
  • show Education by Income where Income > 100K

    Optionally use K (to denote thousands) or M (to denote millions).

  • show Revenue in 2017 and 2018
  • show Income by Month for New York City
  • what are the top 5 States by average Inventory, excluding California

Filtered visualizations include a filter icon (Visualization filter icon), located in the upper-right corner of the chart. Hover over the icon to display the applied filtering.

create dashboard
Generates a new dashboard based on the currently selected data source. You can modify the visualizations, tabs, order, etc. and save your new dashboard. By default, the generated dashboard will include advanced analytics and predictive charts.

Automatically generating dashboards for larger data sources may result in performance issues. To circumvent this, you can enter create simple dashboard to generate a basic dashboard. Then you can modify the dashboard by replacing charts with more sophisticated visualizations, such as driver analysis or spiral charts.