Misc Formatting Issues

[rjhrrs]

Hi,

I am a relatively new user of cognos 8 and i am really excited about its capabilities but i am a little concerned over the formatting issues i have been experiencing.

1. we have a section called all periods. from with in there, there is the "current month" which is what i use in the report but instead of it showing up as current month on the report, is there any way to set it up so that it will recognize the current month and display the actual month (ex. current month > October)?

2. i have a list of gl accounts going down the left-hand side and i would like to suppress anything with zeros. its not as easy to complete as in cognos upfront ha.

any suggestions or tips would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Rob

 

[yphilogene]

Well, there are several techniques that would resolve your issues, but I need more information.

Are you working with cubes/DMR or tables? Are you working with Report Studio, Query Studio or Analysis Studio?

Is your "list" of GL accounts displayed in a List or a Crosstab?

I won't be able to suggest any solution without those infos.

 

[rjhrrs]

the data that i am working with is in cubes and i am using report studio. Also, the accounts are in a crosstab formation. I hope this helps.

 

[yphilogene]

Indeed, working with cubes in Report Studio is very exciting, you can do a lot a thing with OLAP functions.

1) I understand that you have a member called 'Current Month' that display the value of a measure for the current month. But the member itself shows 'Current Month' instead of 'October 2007' for example. Well, I don't have a perfect solution for that. The crosstab displays the caption of the member, and a caption can't be dynamic. What you can do is to modify the text source property of the Current Month member once in the crosstab. You can for example change it to "Report Expression" and put the AsOfDate() expression. This will display a date like '17 october 2007'. You won't be able to modify it through SQL function like 'to_char' though.

2) I guess that you're talking about the 'Suppress Zero' functionnality of Powerplay, which suppresses all rows and columns at zero. Indeed, it is not as simple as a simple click in Cognos 8, but there is a functionnality that is much more powerful. Use the OLAP function 'filter' which takes every member of a set and check a condition. If the member does not verify the condition, then it won't be kept. So, first, you need to put all your accounts into a set with the OLAP function "set". Then you need to create another data item that filters the set.

 

[rjhrrs]

thanks for the advice. in addition, i am trying to conditional format any variances that are less than zero red. any way you could help me through this...step by step?

Thanks,

Rob

 

[yphilogene]

For conditionnal formating, you need to use "variables".

Here, a boolean variable should be ok. The expression of the boolean variable should look like "[Query 1].[Variance]>0". This boolean variable can have two values: Yes or No.

Then, you need to link the variable with the object to format, here, the "Crosstab Fact Cells". It should have a property called "Style variable". Link your variable to this property.

Then, choose the value Yes (in the variable tab, Report Studio should become green when a variable value is chosen) and choose a color for the Crosstab Fact Cells. Do the same for the value No.

For detailed infos, see the Report Studio User Guide.