Narrative insights in visualizations

You can view narrative insights in dashboard visualizations that help you see meaningful aspects of the chart’s data in natural language. When you generate narrative insights, you can highlight the insights that are of interest to you and share them with other users.

Narrative insights are auto-generated and can even use data from outside the visualization (such as other measures, categories, or time dimensions) to draw conclusions, explain and highlight potential drivers or underlying causes, or further breakdown data.

To see narrative insights in a visualization:

  1. Click the Narrative insights icon in the visualization, or click Analytics to open the Analytics panel.
    Note: Narrative insights are not supported in the Crosstab, Driver analysis, and Table visualizations.
  2. Expand the Narrative insights section to see the narrative insights for your visualization.
Visualization displaying narrative insights
Dashboard authors can mark a narrative insight as a favorite by clicking the star icon in the insight. Favoriting an insight lets you highlight the insight and share it with other users.
Important: You need to save the dashboard for other users to see the insights you marked as favorite.

You can also choose the order in which your favorite insights display.

Screenshot showing favorited narrative insight

Only dashboard authors can make changes to their favorited insights. For example, dashboard authors can add or remove an insight from favorites, and rank the insights in the order they want them to display. Other users that consume the dashboard, can view favorited insights and also see up to three additional insights that are suggested by Cognos Analytics for the dashboard.

View of narrative insights when dashboard is shared with other users

Narrative insights are dynamic and change as the data in the visualization changes. If the data in the visualization changes, narrative insights that are no longer relevant, do not display.

Favorited insights that do not apply to the current data are also hidden from the view. However, if the data changes back to where the hidden favorited insights are relevant again, these insights will display in the favorited insights section again.