Getting started in IBM Cognos Analytics - Dashboards and Stories

IBM® Cognos® Analytics provides dashboards and stories to communicate your insights and analysis. You can assemble a view that contains visualizations such as a graph, chart, plot, table, map, or any other visual representation of data.

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 the Open menu icon Open menu icon, and then click new icon New.
  2. Click Dashboard or click Story.
  3. Select a template. Cognos Analytics provides templates that contain predefined layouts and grid lines to help with arrangement and alignment of the visualizations in a view.
  4. Add visualizations to your view in one or more of the following ways:
    • If you know the data that you want to see, but are not sure about how to present it, click Select a source to add data to the Selected sources pane. Then, drag columns onto the canvas. Cognos Analytics displays them in the appropriate visualization.
    • If you know the type of visualization you want to use, select the visualization type and then add columns to it.
    • Drag your collected visualizations from the My pins pane to quickly build a dashboard or story.
  5. 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.
  6. Enhance your view and draw attention to visualizations by adding text, images, media, and web pages.
  7. Personalize your view by changing the theme. You can choose a light or dark theme. You can also customize specific visualization properties such as fill and border color, and opacity.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. Test the view.