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Cognos
The “Business” style looks the best in my opinion (under My Preferences in the top right).
I also entered ’50’ entries in list view to see more files while navigating.
When attempting to use communication between portlets on pages, if you already have the link set up and you add a new parameter, you must break the report/page links and reassign it if it seems as though the reports are not communicating.
Report Studio
Click the unlock button (on the ribbon by the run button) for more fine control of placement. You can add blocks and text inside of lists this way, and create dynamic labels for lists with the Report Expression text items. (When Katie discovered this, it was a giant leap forward for the awesomeness of our reports)
Put text in blocks, it looks better in Excel.
You can drag a text item over a button to make the button say whatever you wish.
Add a border to both sides of the line as sometimes it messes up if only one side of the line is bordered.
When you hide adornments on prompts, you must add a 12 pixel padding to get the prompt to line up with other prompts.
Clicking on the dashed line on a drop-down prompt will reset it.
If something is hidden or not rendered, no calculations will be performed for it, however if it is just not visible, the calculations will be performed.
Drill-through links are great for showing the same report in a PDF or Excel download:
Render variables are nice for showing different lists/text based upon your output (ReportOutput()=’HTML’, ReportOutput()=’PDF’, ReportOutput()<>’HTML’ and ReportOutput()<>’PDF’ is what we did for Excel), use =’HTML’ on drill-through links so they do not show on a PDF or Excel, and use <>’HTML’ to show selections for prompts only on a PDF or Excel output
Render variables are also helpful for showing text when certain conditions are met, we have a report which shows text alerting the user when the term selected is not the current term.
Make sure, however, if you are working with drill-through links, that you save the report before you run it. Drill-throughs will only run a saved report, not a modified un-saved report.
