As part of my monthly Request For Enhancement Roundup list, I present January 2019. This is the third month, please look at December’s list for more.

1. Cascade Prompts on filters on Dashboards like reports

Uncommitted Candidate with 24 votes.

A straightforward mechanism to creating cascading prompts would improve the usability of dashboards substantially. I feel like the prompting side needs an overhaul.

2. Share pins : to be able to create a pin library for certain target groups

Uncommitted Candidate with 9 votes.

My biggest concern with adhoc reports has always been the same, most users simply want to be given the data they need. This RFE would make a nice stopgap, it would allow a user to create a generic library of pins for the end users, thus giving the end users the data they need in an adhoc environment, without them having to work hard for it.

3. List and Crosstab Visualization Lagging Behind Power BI and Tableau

Submitted with 19 votes

This really speaks for itself. There are a lot of things Cognos struggles with in terms of lists and crosstabs. Embedding a microchart is possible, but it’s clunky and slow. Something built-in would be wonderful. It is possible to make a widget that pulls the data in and builds a modern datatable on the fly, but that wouldn’t work when exporting to PDF.

4. Adding images to reports and dashboards

Submitted with 10 votes

A simple uploader for images! Why can’t we do this? And while we’re at it, let’s do the same thing for JavaScript controls.

5. Make map visualization viewable in PDF format

Submitted with 11 votes

PDF support is pretty limited, but having a report ready visualization that doesn’t export cleanly is a big problem.

6. Allow user to add extra properties in vizualisation (Dashboard)

Submitted with 10 votes

I’ve been struggling a lot of with the dashboard visualizations. A colleague said something along the lines of “Dashboards are great if you’re willing to give up control”. I want to make my bed and eat it too!

An update about Think 2019. I will not be attending this year unfortunately, but my company is planning a major presence at Analytics University. The trend at Think has been to reduce focus on the business analytics sides of things drastically, so it’s just not as important to us as it once was.