IBM Cognos 10 Report Studio Cookbook - Softcover

Reseña del editor

Getting the most out of IBM Cognos Report Studio is a breeze with this recipe-packed cookbook. Cherry-pick the ones you want or go through the tutorial step by step – either way you’ll end up with some highly impressive reports.

Overview

• Learn advanced techniques to produce real-life reports that meet business demands
• Learn tricks and hacks for speedy and effortless report development
• Peek into the best practices used in industry and discover ways to work like a pro

In Detail

IBM 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, this book is designed to take the reader beyond the basics and into the world of creating more sophisticated, functional business reports.

IBM Cognos 10 Report Studio Cookbook, Second Edition 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.

Written in a recipe style, this book offers step-by-step instructions for IBM Cognos Report Studio users to author reports effectively, allowing a reader to dip in and out of the chapters as they desire.

You will see a new fictional business case in each recipe that will relate to a real-life problem and then you will learn how to crack it in Report Studio.

This book covers all the basic and advanced features of Report Authoring. It introduces 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. You will discover how to build and use Cognos Active Reports, a new addition in IBM Cognos 10.

Provide richness to the user interface by adding JavaScript and HTML tags and using the different chart types introduced in IBM Cognos 10. The main focus is on the practical use of various powerful features that Report Studio has to offer to suit your business requirements.

Learn numerous techniques and hacks that will allow you to make the best out of your IBM Cognos 10 Report Studio.

What you will learn from this book

• Learn basic and advanced options around sorting, filtering, and aggregation of data
• Explore the powerful features of Report Studio—Conditional Formatting, Cascaded Prompts, Master-Detailed queries, and more
• Learn how to build and use Active Reports
• Achieve real business demands such as dynamic drill-though links, showing tooltips, minimum column width, prompt manipulation, and merged cells
• Learn to edit reports outside Report Studio using XML editing
• Develop sophisticated printer friendly reports
• Introduce best practices such as inserting comments, regression testing, and version controlling in your reports
• Enhance the features of Report Studio by using macros and Work with dimensional models (DMRs and Cubes)

Biografía del autor

Ahmed Lashin is a highly motivated Information Technology (IT) professional with more than nine years of experience, most of it in the Business Intelligence and data warehousing domains. His core skills include a full set of BI tools, ETL, and data warehousing tools such as IBM Cognos, IBM DataStage, SAP BusinessObjects, Microsoft SQL Server BI SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS. Through his experience, he has been exposed to many industries such as banking and finance, oil and gas, education, and the automotive industry. Currently, Ahmed is working as a Business Intelligence Lead in one of IBM's major global partners. He is also an IBM Certified Cognos Solution Expert. This is Ahmed's first technical book. He is maintaining a technical blog at http://www.alashin.net. You can get in touch with him at ahmed@alashin.net. Abhishek Sanghani was born in India and attended Mumbai University, where he majored in Computer Engineering. He began his career in 2004 as a Business Intelligence and Cognos Consultant, and has worked with leading IT and financial services companies since then. He pursued Finance Management along with his work in the field of Cognos and BI, successfully progressing and winning awards and certifications year-on-year. Presently, he is working in the United Kingdom, utilizing his skills of Cognos, SQL, BI, and data warehousing. In his free time, he writes technical blogs and also provides training/seminars on demand. He first authored Packt Publishing's book IBM Cognos 8 Report Studio Cookbook, which was well received worldwide. He has recently composed a video course called IBM Cognos 10 Report Studio Fundamentals, which is available on the www.packtpub.com website for download as well as online streaming.