End users normally want to view their data in the most visible manner possible. As a Cognos Report Studio developer you can develop your report template to highlight data to better identify exceptional results. Take for instance if you wanted to identify a sales representative who has exceeded their monthly sales quota. You would create a condition that checks whether the representative’s sales for the month are greater than their quota for the last month.
Here are the steps in order to achieve this:
1. From within Cognos Report Studio create a variable and define the condition that determines if the data will be highlighted.
2. In the work area, click the column that you want to highlight based on the condition you created.
3. In the Properties pane, double-click the Style Variable property.
4. Click Variable, click the variable you want to assign to the object, and click OK.
5. If you assigned a string variable, in the Values box, select the values you want the condition to support.
Tip: A default value exists for the variable, and it is always selected.
6. If you assigned a language variable, in the Values box, select the languages you want the condition to support.
Tip: A default value exists for the variable, and it is always selected.
7. Click OK.
8. Pause the pointer over the condition explorer and click one of the possible values for the variable other than the default value.
Tip: When you select a value in Condition Explorer, the Explorer bar becomes green to indicate that conditional formatting is turned on, and that any changes you make to the report applies only to the variable value. For example, if you created a boolean variable, click the Yes value.
9. In the Properties pane, specify the formatting that you want to highlight the column with when the condition is satisfied. For example, click the Border property to create a thicker border around the column.
10. Repeat steps 9 to 10 for other possible values defined for the variable.
Tip: When pausing the pointer over the condition explorer button, click (No variable) to view how the report looks when no variable is applied. Or you can triple-click the Explorer bar.
When you run the Report Studio 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.
