Book Image

IBM Cognos 8 Planning

Book Image

IBM Cognos 8 Planning

Overview of this book

Business planning is no longer just about defining goals, identifying critical issues, and then mapping out strategies. In today's dynamic and highly competitive business environment, companies with complex business models want their abstract strategies turned into discrete, executable plans. They want information from the field to reach decision makers in real-time so that they can fine-tune their plans as events unfold. IBM Cognos 8 Planning offers just that. This book provides you with everything you need to know for building planning models using IBM Cognos 8 Planning. After reading this book, you can begin your journey into model building bringing with you a perspective that comes from three of the most seasoned IBM Cognos Planning consultants in the business. In this book, you will learn how to build planning models using IBM Cognos Planning's modeling tool, Analyst. We introduce you to key objects in Analyst that let you define, store, and move data. Then we show how you can deploy the model to hundreds or thousands of users using IBM Cognos Planning's web-based tool, Contributor. We demonstrate some of the things you can do as an administrator and as a user. Finally, we show the automation tools that you can use to maintain and support your models. As we go through this, we will share with you tips and tricks and insights from our experience with real implementations.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
IBM Cognos 8 Planning
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewers
Preface
5
Defining Data Structures: D-List
Index

Managing Analyst objects


In this section, we will explain how you can use the Library Functions box to locate, open, run, copy, print, and delete Analyst objects such as D-Lists, D-Cubes, and Macros. To open the Library Functions screen, click on File|Library Functions from the menu. The following screen will be displayed:

The Library Functions screen has two drop-down boxes. The first drop-down box shows a list of object types, such as D-Cube or D-List. The second drop-down box shows a list of libraries. It also contains a series of buttons that can be used to process specific object management tasks. The following is a list of these buttons, and a description of what processes can be performed by clicking them:

Icon

Name

Description

Filter

This can be used to create a filter when locating or selecting objects. The * symbol can be used as a wildcard. The = sign can be used to find objects that match the exact criteria. Alternatively, use < > to locate objects that do not match...