Use crosstab explorations to quickly change how you view performance measures, such as revenue or budgeted production costs.
OLAP (online analytical processing) exploration uses the term slicing and dicing to describe the ease with which you can change context and view details. For example, you look at revenue for the years 2006 to 2008 by sales region. You notice a dip in the revenue for 2007. By clicking 2007, you can drill down to show revenue results by quarter for 2007. You can easily change the view from quarters for 2007 to sales personnel by replacing quarters with sales personnel.
You can compare and manipulate data so that you can better understand relationships between data and the relative importance of individual data items. Whether you want to assess revenue growth or to identify top performers, IBM Cognos Analysis for Microsoft Excel provides the filtering and sorting support you need for exploration and write back.
To extend the example of reviewing revenue by sales region and sales personnel, you can add sales targets and then calculate the percentage difference between the sales target and actual revenue for each salesperson. The result indicates who achieved their sales quota as well as who is eligible for a bonus.
For an example about creating a basic crosstab exploration, see Example - evaluate revenue from specific order methods.
If you are already comfortable with exploration fundamentals, you may want to refine your crosstab by using tasks such as manipulating the rows and columns, filtering data, and sharing the results.
For more information, see Swap rows and columns in a crosstab and Filter values using context.
Use list explorations to show detailed information from your database, such as customer lists or product lists. Data sources can be relational, OLAP, dimensionally modeled relational (DMR), or IBM Cognos TM1 cubes.
A list exploration is a report that shows data in rows and columns. Each column shows all the values for a data item in the database or a calculation based on data items in the database. You can create a list to look up the value of an item from the database. It can then supply the value to another worksheet where it can be used for setting a parameter. For more information, see the section on use cases and examples.