Get started with Dashboards and Stories

Creating a dashboard or story

If you're new to dashboards and stories, review the following steps to understand the general workflow to create a view.

1. Click , and click Dashboard, or click Story.
2. Select a template. Cognos Analytics provides templates that contain predefined layouts and grid lines for easy arrangement and alignment of the visualizations in a view.
3. Add visualizations to your view in one or more of the following ways:
   • If you know the type of visualization you want to use, select the visualization type and then add columns to it.
   • If you know the data that you want to see, but are not sure about how to present it, click and add a source to the Selected sources pane. Then, drag columns onto the canvas. Cognos Analytics displays them in the appropriate visualization.
   • Drag your collected visualizations from the My pins panel to quickly build a story.
4. Limit the data that is displayed by filtering in one or more of the following ways:
   • You can filter individual visualizations or on all visualizations in the view.
   • You can even filter on a column that is not displayed in the visualization by using a context filter.
   • You can select a specific value or a range of values.
5. Enhance your view and draw attention to visualizations by adding media, web pages, images, shapes, and text.
6. Personalize your view by changing the theme. You can choose from default, light, or dark themes. You can also customize specific visualization properties such as fill and border color, and opacity.
7. Create more meaningful or complex visualizations by adding columns to an existing visualization. Drag another column onto a visualization and it changes to match the new data added.
8. You can undo and redo your last actions in succession. The ability to undo and redo previous actions is available until you close the view.
9. Test the view.