General

The following general features are new in Cognos® Analytics 11.1.0.

Upload files and launch components at the same time

Use Quick launch to upload files to Cognos Analytics 11.1.0 and simultaneously start a data module, exploration, or dashboard. Drag files onto the welcome page to activate quick launch. When Quick launch appears, drop the files into the appropriate box to immediately start building a data module, exploration, or dashboard. The uploaded files are stored in your My content folder.

Enhanced support for uploaded files

The following new features were added for uploaded files:

• Support for multi-tab spreadsheets.

  You can upload spreadsheets with multiple tabs. Each tab appears as a separate table.

• Support for the compressed (.zip) file format.

  Multiple .csv (only) files can be compressed into a .zip file for a quick upload.

• Support for multi-file upload.

  You can upload multiple files concurrently by using the Quick launch functionality or multi-selecting them.

• Providing progress and error details for single-file uploads, and consolidated progress percentage for multi-file uploads, at different upload stages.
• Updating data in uploaded files.

  Use the Append file option to append new rows of data to your source file from a different file. Use the Replace file option to replace all rows of data in your source file with data from a different file. For a successful update, the column names and data types, and the order of columns must be identical in both files.

For more information, see Uploaded files.

Support for relative dates

The relative dates feature makes it easier to do as-of-date analysis. Examples include current quarter, quarter-to-date, month-to-date, and so on.

Relative date analysis in Cognos Analytics uses a set of prebuilt relative date filters, such as current quarter, quarter-to-date, or (MTD) month-to-date, in a sample calendar data module. To do relative date analysis against your data, you must create a data module that maps your data to the sample calendar, where at least one date column from your data is associated to the calendar, and at least one measure column from your data is associated to the date column. This data module can then be used as a source for relative date analysis in reports and dashboards.

For more information, see Relative date analysis.

Enrich Framework Manager relational packages

Relational packages can be enriched to apply the Cognos Analytics concepts (taxonomy) to query items in the packages.

There are two ways to enrich the package metadata: automatic and manual. When using automatic enrichment, all query items of all visible query subjects in the package are evaluated, and the concepts are automatically applied. When using manual enrichment, the concepts must be set explicitly for each query item. Any concepts that are set by the manual option override any concepts that are set by the automatic option.

For more information, see Enriching packages.

Shortcuts and their targets provide the same context menu options

The shortcut context menu now provides the same options as the target context menu. For example, the Run as option is available from both the report and its shortcut context menus. In previous releases, only a set of default context menu options was available for all shortcuts.