Work with IBM Cognos Analytics data

You can explore IBM® Cognos® Analytics data with Exploration Views.

Use Exploration Views to quickly change how you view performance measures, such as revenue or budgeted production costs.

OLAP (online analytical processing) exploration uses the term slicing and dicing to describe the ease with which you can change context and view details. For example, you look at revenue for the years 2012 to 2015 by sales region. You notice a dip in the revenue for 2014. By clicking 2014, you can drill down to show revenue results by quarter for 2014. You can easily change the view from quarters for 2014 to sales personnel by replacing quarters with sales personnel.

You can compare and manipulate data so that you can better understand relationships between data and the relative importance of individual data items. Whether you want to assess revenue growth or to identify top performers, IBM Planning Analytics for Microsoft Excel provides the filtering and sorting support you need for exploration.

To extend the example of reviewing revenue by sales region and sales personnel, you can add sales targets and then calculate the percentage difference between the sales target and actual revenue for each salesperson. The result indicates who achieved their sales quota as well as who is eligible for a bonus.

For an example about creating a basic Exploration View, see Example - evaluate revenue from specific order methods.

If you are already comfortable with exploration fundamentals, you may want to refine your Exploration View by using tasks such as filtering data, nesting rows and columns, and inserting calculations.