Highlight data in your report to better identify
exceptional results. For example, you want to identify sales representatives
who have exceeded their quota. You create a condition that checks
whether each representative's sales for the year is greater than their
quota for the year.
Style variables are useful if you
are working with reports that were created in a previous version of IBM® Cognos® Business
Intelligence or if you want to use language variables to specify conditional
styles.
You can also use conditional styles to highlight data.
If a report contains both conditional styles and style variables,
the style variables are applied before the conditional styles.
Procedure
- Create a variable and define the condition that
determines if the data will be highlighted.
- In the work area, click the column to highlight based on
the condition.
- In the Properties pane, double-click
the Style Variable property.
- Click Variable, click the variable
to assign to the object, and click OK.
- If you assigned a string variable, in the Values box,
select the values for the condition to support.
Tip: A default value exists for the variable, and it is always
selected.
- If you assigned a language variable, in the Values box,
select the languages for the condition to support.
Tip: A default value exists for the variable, and it is always
selected.
- Click OK.
- Pause the pointer over the condition explorer button
and click a value other than the default value. Tip: When you select a value in the condition explorer, the Explorer bar becomes green to indicate that conditional formatting is turned on and that any changes you make to the report apply only to the variable value.
For example, if you created a Boolean variable, click Yes.
- In the Properties pane, specify
the formatting with which to highlight the column when the condition
is satisfied.
For example, click the Border property
to create a thicker border around the column.
- Repeat steps 8 to 9 for other possible values defined for
the variable.
Tip: To view
the report with no variables applied, pause the pointer over the condition
explorer button and click (No variable) or
triple-click the Explorer bar.
Results
When you run the report, the report objects to which you applied
the variable are highlighted when the condition is satisfied. For
example, if you created a Boolean variable, the objects are highlighted
when the condition is met. If the condition is not satisfied for any
object, no conditional formatting is applied.
