Written by Mike Bernaiche, April 21st 2022

I am sure some of you reading can relate to this situation.  Management reporting is due each month and quarter and you spend hours searching for updated numbers and then copying or typing numbers into your PowerPoint presentation, hoping you grabbed the correct data points.  Then you complete your presentation, and someone adjusted a few numbers and now it must be redone.  Now you are working late on Friday to finish.  It is frustrating, I know, I have been in your shoes.  I have a wonderful solution for you, IBM Cognos Analytics for Office.  This product has been around for a long time, but you don’t see a lot written or shown on it.  If you could solve the issue above with a couple of clicks inside of PowerPoint, isn’t it worth it?  The best news is, if you own IBM Cognos Analytics you own IBM Cognos Analytics for Office.  All you need to do is install the product and anyone licensed with a user license or higher in Cognos Analytics has access.

What is IBM Cognos Analytics for Office?

IBM Cognos Analytics for Office provides the framework that leverages the business intelligence architecture, including security, metadata, and content storage.  This infrastructure helps you manage your Microsoft Office documents and monitor the financial performance of your organization.  Use the applications of IBM Cognos Office to create, view, and consume reports, analyses, and other business intelligence content using familiar Microsoft Office applications, such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.

What Data Can I Use?

In short, if the data is in Cognos Analytics you can embed it into PowerPoint, Word or connect with Excel.  What does that mean?  Flat files uploaded to Cognos, data base connections, Framework Manager models, Transformer models and Planning Analytics / TM1 models.  You will see in the below screen shot the contents of the team content area.  You can also use the “my folders” area as well.

How to Get Started

1.  Install Cognos Analytics for Office on each user’s local machine and ensure that the IBM Framework for Office add in is enabled.  Installing IBM Cognos for Microsoft Office - IBM Documentation
2. Click the connect button and set up your connection to your Cognos Analytics environment.  You will use your connection URL to your Cognos system.
3. Click the IBM Cognos for Microsoft Office button and connect.  You should now see the tree of folders and packages in the task pane.

Now that the connection has been created, it is time to start to bring the data into PowerPoint.

1.  You need to create the report objects in Cognos Analytics.  You create either a list or crosstab report for the data that is required in your presentation.
2. Once the report is created simply save it to a location in team content or my content.
3. Now start to create your presentation and go to the location in the task pain and select the report you need for the particular slide you are working on.
4. Either double click or right click and insert report.
5. You can add format options for the chart such as colors, dollar signs, bold type, etc. directly in Excel.
6. Also, by changing the way you bring in the report you can create a chart and apply options to the charts directly inside of PowerPoint.
7. Once you have completed your presentation you can simply refresh the data by clicking on the refresh data button in the IBM taskbar.

Examples:

Summary

As you can read it is pretty simple but powerful to use the IBM Cognos Analytics for Office add in.  You can save many hours of work by creating the templates and just refreshing the data each time you need to update the presentations.  If you need help or want to discuss, please reach out to services@lodestarsolutions.com.

Did you find this blog helpful?  If so, be sure to check out our website and see all our latest blogs.  We release a new blog each week full of helpful information for IBM Cognos licensing or on other Business Inteligence topics. Check us out at www.lodestarsolutions.com.