My coworker Ryan ( http://ibmblueview.com) did a poll in his What's new in Cognos 11.1.4 live demo yesterday ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx7p4dzlQeo ) asking if any of the 80 participants on the call have a Dashboard (using the dashboard tool) live in Production. The answer was a resounding "almost none".
I understand this. I actually really like the Dashboard tool but I've been wishing they called it anything but Dashboards. Explorations (which now means something else), Querying, Questions, anything but dashboards. Dashboards have a very specific meaning in most people's minds and this tool wasn't exactly doing what it promised.
But name aside, this tool is getting SO good and it's getting closer to actually being a dashboard tool. It's always been amazing for allowing users to explore their data. The ability to create "prompt" filters by simply dragging in a data item? Brilliant. The ease of creating visualizations? Awesome.
But it had some issues.
Number 1 issue, the crosstab and list objects.
Here's the crosstab in 11.1.3:
If you are used to using crosstabs in any of the other tools, this one was just plain painful to work with. It's big and clunky (and ugly). Want to add nesting? Can't just drag and drop. Have to expand into focus mode and drag it over.
Now it's even bigger and even clunkier (and uglier).
Here's the same crosstab in 11.1.4:
So much prettier and guess what? You can drag and drop (like every other tool).
And one of my favorite features? I don't know why this makes me so happy. I'm not even sure it's super useful. But I love it. Abbreviate in a crosstab.
Look how pretty that is!