The Assistant is a powerful feature in Cognos
Analytics that allows you to ask questions and discover insights in natural language.
Here are some examples of what you can ask the Assistant to do:
- Show overview
- Type help to display an overview and general
usage information.
- Suggest questions
- Type Suggest questions to ask the Assistant to suggest a set of questions
that you can ask. Suggestions are based on the
context of your data source and particular industry.
Before requesting suggestions, you must select a data source to set the context. You can also type
Suggest questions for <column name> to receive a set of questions based on
the context of one
or more columns. After a set of questions is suggested by the Assistant,
you can
click one of the suggestions to ask that question.
- View data sources
- Type Show data to see all of the 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 sets
- Framework Manager packages and OLAP data sources (See Enriching packages).
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 data source details
- Type Show source <source name> or
load source <source
name> to display a list of relevant fields and details
for your specified data source.
- The toolbar displays the <source name> that
is in context. If a
context is not set, it uses the active source in your dashboard or exploration panel as the loaded
source.
- 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.
- If you do not have Use Assistant capability on a specific source, when
you enter Show source <source name>, the Assistant displays a message
indicating that the package cannot be used.
Note: The list of sources returned by Show
source also includes those sources which you do not have access to.
- Show column details
- Type Show column <column name> to display information and related
fields for your specified column. If you apply an aggregation or filter to the column, the
Assistant
returns a chart or visualization.
- Show column influencers
- Type What influences column <column-name> to
display a list of fields
that influences the results in your specified column.
- Create a dashboard
- Type Create dashboard to generate a new
dashboard based on the currently
selected data source.
- You can use columns with aggregations and filters when creating a dashboard. When you request
for aggregations or filters, the Assistant applies
the
aggregation or filter to all of the charts in the dashboard. For example, if you asked
for
Average profit, the aggregation is applied to all of the charts in the
created dashboard. If you requested Profit by product where budget sales
>
500, then all of the charts in the dashboard will be for sales under 500.
- The Assistant creates additional 3 tabs in the dashboard if you
ask for a
top
or bottom filter. For example, if you asked for
create a dashboard with
the top 5 products by profit, your dashboard will
contain charts with top
5 filter applied in addition to 3 tabs, one for each top 3 product.
- You can modify the visualizations, tabs, order, and so on, and save your new
dashboard. By
default, the generated dashboard will include advanced analytics and predictive charts.
Note: This
functionality is not available in IBM®
Cognos® Analytics for Mobile.