Example - Create a Discontinuous Crosstab

You are a report author at The Sample Outdoors Company, which sells sporting equipment. You are requested to create a report showing sales for each product line by quarter and by order method. Since the report will have columns with data from different dimensions, you create a discontinuous crosstab report. Discontinuous crosstabs are also known as disconnected or disjoint crosstabs or crosstabs with unrelated columns.

Procedure

  1. Open IBM® Cognos® Report Studio with the GO Data Warehouse (query) package.
  2. In the Welcome dialog box, click Create a new report or template.
  3. In the New dialog box, click Crosstab and click OK.
  4. From the Source tab source tab:
    • Expand Sales and Marketing (query) and Sales (query).
    • Expand Product and drag Product line to the Rows area.
    • Expand Order method and drag Order method to the Columns area.
    • Expand Sales fact and drag Revenue to the Measures area.
  5. On the Source tab, expand Retailer site and drag Region to the left of Order method.
    Tip: Drop Region into the crosstab when a flashing vertical bar appears between the Product line column and the Order method column. Otherwise, Region may appear as a nested row instead of a column.
  6. Click Region.
  7. In the Properties pane, double-click the Sorting property.
  8. From the Data Items pane, drag Region to the Sort List pane.
  9. Click the sort order button sort icon to sort in ascending order and click OK.
  10. Run the report.

Results

Figure 1. Crosstab showing revenue by product line by region
the final crosstab showing revenue by product line by region
Parent topic: Crosstabs