Unsupported IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson Formatting

About 30% of the formatting functions available in IBM® Cognos® Analytics with Watson are not supported in the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software.

In particular, Excel does not allow changing locale-dependent formatting attributes, such as the following:

  • Decimal Separator
  • Exponential Symbol
  • Group Separator
  • Monetary Decimal Separator
  • AM String
  • Day Name
  • Day Short Name
  • Decimal Delimiter Symbol
  • Month Name
  • Month Short Name
  • PM String
  • YYYY date format pattern

    Excel does not provide an equivalent capability to the Y formatting character. As a result, Cognos Analytics cannot preserve this capability when creating XLSX files.

In addition, Excel does not support the following:

  • Format Width
  • International Currency Symbol
  • List Separator
  • Percent Symbol (Excel does not support percent symbols for charts)
  • Multiplier
  • Overline Text Format
  • PerMill Symbol
  • Plus Sign
  • Scale (Excel has a different scaling formula than IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson)
  • Calendar (Excel does not allow changing the calendar)
  • Era Name
  • First Day Of Week
  • Show Era