Why do you see date/year or customer number or invoice number fields with values like 2016, 2032, 8022?

The reason is aggregate property was set incorrectly by the modeler. The modeler set the aggregate property to ‘Total’.

The aggregation for Attributes should be set as None, unsupported or maybe count.
Summarization should be performed only on Facts and not on attributes.
You as a report developer can set the aggregate property to ‘None’.

How to quickly display your Measures either as Values or percent of values?

IBM Cognos PowerPlay Studio allows you to display your measures as Values or percent of totals or percent of sub totals.

Steps to do this:

1. On the report Right-Click on the intersection of row and column labels

2. Choose either Values or percent of totals options.

How to display your reports on the Dashboard?

IBM Cognos Report studio allows you to display selected reports on your Dashboard.
Steps to do this:
1. Click on new Page Icon give it a name “My Daily Watch List”. Click Next
2.Select the Dashboard Layoutat the bottom click on “add”
3.Select Dashboard utilityand select "Multipage"
4.Click Next and enable ‘add the page to portal tabs’ and click Finish

5.Click on the edit button

6.Click on  and choose a folder or package with reports

7.See the output

How to use HTML tags to improve your reports?

HTML tags can deliver a lot of content without reducing performance of your reports.

For example: Use HTML tags to provide mouse over features on prompts, column labels etc.

How to organize information in multiple fields into one column such as addresses or name-invoice numbers etc?

IBM Cognos Report studio allows you to organize related content into a single column.

For example in the image below we have organized the employee information into a single column.

Steps to do this:

1. Add the required field to the List Object
2. Click on the "LOCK" icon to unlock the column
3.Add the other related fields

How to quickly create professional looking report formats and styles?

IBM Cognos Report Studio provides various Table styles to meet the needs of financial, budgeting, accounting and other reports.