Book Image

IBM Cognos 8 Report Studio Cookbook

By : Abhishek Sanghani
Book Image

IBM Cognos 8 Report Studio Cookbook

By: Abhishek Sanghani

Overview of this book

Cognos Report Studio is widely used for creating and managing business reports in medium to large companies. It is simple enough for any business analyst, power user, or developer to pick up and start developing basic reports. However, when it comes to developing more sophisticated, fully functional business reports for wider audiences, report authors will need guidance. This book helps you understand and use all the features provided by Report Studio to generate impressive deliverables. It will take you from being a beginner to a professional report author. It bridges the gap between basic training provided by manuals or trainers and the practical techniques learned over years of practice. This book covers all the basic and advanced features of Report Authoring. It begins by bringing readers on the same platform and introducing the fundamental features useful across any level of reporting. Then it ascends to advanced techniques and tricks to overcome Studio limitations.Develop excellent reports using dimensional data sources by following best practices that development work requires in Report Studio. You will also learn about editing the report outside the Studio by directly editing the XML specifications. Provide richness to the user interface by adding JavaScript and HTML tags. The main focus is on the practical use of various powerful features that Report Studio has to offer to suit your business requirements.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
IBM Cognos 8 Report Studio Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Choosing right colors


Most of the business reports are printed on greyscale printer. This recipe will highlight the importance of choosing the right colors when reports are meant for printing.

Getting ready

We will use the report used in all the previous recipes for this.

How to do it...

  1. Open the report in Report Studio. Select the list column titles.

  2. From properties, open the Background Color dialog. Go to the Web Safe Colors tab.

  3. Select the #CC99FF color (6th Column, 10th Row).

  4. Now select the Product line footer (sub-total) row and set its background color to #CCFF33 (13th Column, 10th Row).

  5. Run the report and examine colors. Now print the report and examine colors. You will notice that though both the colors are very different (one is a shade of green and other is purple), they look almost the same on the grayscale printout.

  6. Now change the List Column titles to any color from 9th or 11th row. Print the output and you see that the colors are distinguishable now.

How it works...

If you print the...