Uploaded files

If you want to do some quick analysis and visualizations with data files, you can upload the files to IBM® Cognos® Analytics by yourself. Your data files must meet size and structure requirements.

The data in the files must be in a simple columnar format. Pivot tables or crosstabs aren’t supported.

The size limits for uploaded files are configured by administrators in Manage > Configuration > System > Data. The settings that need to be modified are Size limit per upload of data (MB) and Size limit of stored data per user (MB).

The following file size limitations apply to individual users:
  • Maximum size of each individual file. The default is 100 MB.
  • Maximum size of all uploaded files. The default is 500 MB.

The file types that you can upload into Cognos Analytics are specified below.

Microsoft Excel workbook files

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

The file formats .xlsb and .xlsm aren't supported.

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

The following conditions apply to uploading Microsoft Excel files:
  • .xlsx files that are saved in OpenOffice aren’t supported.
  • Password-protected Excel files aren’t supported.
  • Filters in Excel files are ignored. You can use the filtering options in data modules 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 uploading 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 uploading the files.

Delimiter-separated values files

The supported delimiter symbols include commas, tabs, semi-colons, and pipes ( | ). The file extension can be .csv, .tsv, .tab, 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 Analytics 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

Jupyter Notebook files (.ipynb)

You can upload Jupyter Notebook (.ipynb) files that were created in a Jupyter environment outside of Cognos Analytics.

For more information, see Uploading external notebooks.

Compressed files (.zip and .gz)

The compressed file types that you can upload to Cognos Analytics are .zip and .gz files.

The .zip file can contain files with different (supported) extensions, such as .csv, .xls, .xlsx, or .txt. The .gz format can be used only with .csv files, which means that only the .csv.gz extension is supported.

When a .zip file is uploaded, all files inside the ZIP archive are treated as if they were from one Excel workbook, and a table is created for each file. If a file inside the ZIP archive contains multiple worksheets, a table is created for each worksheet. Each of those tables is named using the FileName - SheetName naming convention. For example, a .zip file contains the Product.csv and Geography.xlsx files, where Geography.xlsx contains two sheets, Country and Region. After the .zip file is uploaded to Cognos Analytics, the file is shown with the following 3 tables: Product, Geography - Country, and Geography - Region. Cognos Analytics tries to detect joins between all of these tables.

The files inside a ZIP archive are saved together in Team content or My content. You cannot replace a subset of files that were uploaded as a single .zip file. The whole .zip file must be replaced.