Assistant capabilities and commands

The Assistant is a powerful feature in Cognos Analytics that allows you to ask questions and discover insights in natural language.

You can use the following questions in the Assistant:

  • Show overview

    Type help to display an overview and general
 usage information.

  • Suggest questions

    Type Suggest questions to ask the Assistant to 
suggest a set of questions that you can ask.

    Suggestions are based on the
 context of your data source and particular industry. Before requesting suggestions, you must select 
a data source to set the context.

    You can also type Suggest questions for <column name> to receive a set of questions based on the context of one 
or more columns.

    After a set of questions is suggested by the Assistant,
 you can click one of the suggestions to ask that question.

  • View data sources


    Type Show data to list all of the supported data
 sources that you have access to in My content and Team
 content. Supported data sources include:

    • Uploaded files (csv, tsv, xls, xlsx, and zip)
    • Data modules
    • Data set
    • Framework Manager packages and OLAP data sources (See Enriching packages).
    When results exceed the number of displayed items, click
 More to view up to 100 data sources. Scroll to the bottom of the list and 
click Less to collapse the list.

  • Show data source details

    Type Show source <source name> or 
load source <source name> to display a list of relevant fields and details
for your specified data source.

    The toolbar displays the <source name> that
 is in context. If a context is not set, it uses the active source in your dashboard or exploration panel as the loaded source.

    When results exceed the number of displayed items, click
 More to view up to 100 data sources. Scroll to the bottom of the list and
 click Less to collapse the list.

  • Show column details

    Type Show column <column name> to display information and related fields for your specified column.

    If you apply an aggregation or filter to the column, the Assistant 
returns you a chart or visualization.

  • Show column influencers

    Type What influences column <column-name> to 
display a list of fields that influences the results in your specified column.

  • Create a chart or visualization

    You can ask the Assistant to create a chart or visualization from any
 number of columns. For example, you can type Show chart <column1> and <column2> to display visualizations that show the relationship between
 <column1> and <column2>.

    You can also ask for filters and aggregations in your charts or 
visualizations.

    After the visualizations are created, you can scroll through them by clicking the left and right arrows. You can also drag the visualization onto your 
dashboard or exploration. Each visualization includes an information icon in the upper-right corner.
 Hover over the icon to see descriptions about the underlying data. You can optionally enter more columns, but excessive columns can result in less effective visualizations.

    Click Show related visualizations to return
 visualizations based on influential and related fields.

    Click Create dashboard from the charts to create
 a new dashboard based on the most recently generated charts.

    Typing Create related
 dashboard produces the same resulting dashboard. If the charts contain top or bottom
 aggregations, these modifiers are applied to the generated dashboard.

    Note: This capability is unavailable in IBM® Cognos® Analytics for Mobile.

  • Create a dashboard

    Type Create dashboard to generate a new
 dashboard based on the currently selected data source.

    You can also request for columns with aggregations and filters when 
creating a dashboard. When you request for aggregations or filters, the Assistant applies the 
aggregation or filter to all of the charts in the dashboard. For example, if you asked for
 Average profit, the aggregation is applied to all of the charts in the
 created dashboard. If you requested Profit by product where budget sales >
 500, then all of the charts in the dashboard will be for sales under 500.

    The Assistant also creates an additional 3 tabs in the dashboard if you
 ask for a top or bottom filter. For example, if you asked for
 create a dashboard with the top 5 products by profit, your dashboard will
 contain charts with a top 5 filter applied in addition to 3 tabs, one for each top 
3 product.

    You can modify the visualizations, tabs, order, etc. and save your new
 dashboard. By default, the generated dashboard will include advanced analytics and predictive charts.

    Note: This capability is unavailable in IBM Cognos Analytics for Mobile.

  • Create a simple dashboard

    Automatically generating dashboards for larger data sources may result
 in performance issues. To circumvent this, you can type Create a simple
 dashboard to generate a basic dashboard without predictive charts.

    After a simple dashboard is created, you can modify the dashboard by
 replacing charts with more sophisticated visualizations, such as driver analysis or spiral
 charts.

    Note: This capability 
is unavailable in IBM Cognos Analytics for Mobile.