Producing a Report in CSV Format

IBM® Cognos® Business Intelligence can produce reports in CSV format so you can open them in other applications, such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software.

Reports saved in CSV format

support Unicode data across many client operating systems
are UTF-16 Little Endian data encoded
include a BOM (Byte Order Mark) at the beginning of the file
are tab-delimited
do not enclose strings in quotation marks
use a new line character to delimit rows

You can open reports saved in CSV format using a variety of spreadsheet software applications. By default, reports produced in CSV format will appear in the application associated with the .csv file type.

You cannot produce the following in CSV format:

maps
charts that do not have at least one category or series
reports that have more than one query defined in the report, unless the additional queries are used for prompts

In IBM Cognos Connection, you can configure the CSV output to suit your environment. For example, you can specify the character used to delimit fields. For more information, see the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Administration and Security Guide.