IBM Cognos Analytics has several ways of allowing data to “jump out” at you so to speak. The feature is called conditional formatting. There are several ways conditional formatting can help you. I will list a few:
1) In a crosstab report. Crosstabs sometimes can be very confusing with too many numbers to discern the ones you really want. As an example, you may want to be able to identify high or low paying customers. With conditional formatting, you can display your crosstab with the high numbers displayed with the color green, while the low numbers will be displayed as red.
2) In a report that will be consumed by many different users. For instance, accountants might want to see data in a crosstab while managers might want to see the data in a visualization. Such a report can be created using Conditional Blocks. The report would give the users a choice of what data object they want to have displayed. can be dynamic.
3) In a report that can potentially display too much data. Some consumers like to have a lot of date while others like to focus on just the data they need. A list data object can be created with columns that would be conditionally rendered. The user would be presented with a question of what they want to see, and Cognos would display only the columns selected.