When you view and run a report, scorecard, or agent, the information that you see comes from data sources, the package, calculations, other properties added by the author, and from IBM Cognos 8 itself.
You use IBM Cognos Connection to organize your reports and other IBM Cognos 8 content such as agents, metrics packages, URLs, and folders. You can access public content on the Public Folders tab or custom portal pages, and store and access your favorite content on the My Folders tab.
If you want to personalize an existing public report or agent, you can create a report or agent view and save the view on the My Folders tab. This allows you to save prompt values, modify the schedule, and change the output format of reports.
For more information, see the online help in IBM Cognos Connection.
When a report is run, it contains the latest data from the data source. However, viewing the most recent data may not always meet your needs. When you want to view older data, you save and view the report output.
Report outputs are created when you schedule a report, when a report has multiple formats or languages, when a report has a delivery method of save, print, or email, and when a report is burst.
You can produce report outputs in the following formats:
HTML
Excel
delimited text (CSV)
XML
If you are the owner of a report or have the necessary permissions, you can specify the default format for each report. You can also specify how many report output versions to keep.
For more information, see the online help in IBM Cognos Connection.
A report can contain drill-through links, also known as Go To links, so that you can easily open related content. A value in the report is linked to more detailed information in another report. For example, a report includes sales information for each continent. When you click a continent name, a more detailed report about sales for that specific continent opens.
When you view report data in IBM Cognos Connection, Query Studio, and Analysis Studio, you can also drill down and drill up. When you drill down, you follow a link from one layer of data to a more detailed layer within the same report. When you drill up, you access a less detailed layer.
For more information, see the online help in IBM Cognos Connection, Query Studio, or Analysis Studio.
IBM Cognos 8 is a multilingual suite that lets you author reports once and deploy them globally. When users open a report, it automatically opens in the proper language, based on their locale settings.
You can select the language that you prefer for the user interface. If your data and reports are available in multiple languages, you can also select the language that you prefer for the content.
To deliver multilingual content, you can create each entry with multilingual properties in the appropriate studio.
For more information about the multilingual capabilities of IBM Cognos 8, see the online help in IBM Cognos Connection or see the IBM Cognos 8 Architecture and Deployment Guide.
In IBM Cognos Connection, you can create your own custom portal pages. You use these portal pages to view frequently-used content, to group related reports and folders, and to combine IBM Cognos and non-IBM Cognos content within a single page. Within your portal pages, you can add IBM Cognos portlets, which you use to view and interact with your IBM Cognos content.
If you have the necessary permissions, you can create public pages that other users and groups can access and even use as their own. You can assign security permissions to allow only certain users to access the pages.
For more information, see the online help in IBM Cognos Connection.