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IBM Cognos 10 Platform => Cognos 10 BI => Report Studio => Topic started by: Michael75 on 17 Jul 2013 07:56:40 AM

Title: Chart output in .xlsx is different from PDF & HTML
Post by: Michael75 on 17 Jul 2013 07:56:40 AM
We're on C10.1.1, I have very little experience with charts, and would really appreciate some guidance.

I'm creating a new report that includes a (legacy) Area Stacked chart and a crosstab. Both are fed off the same FM-based query. The package behind it is relational.

The report is showing amounts across a number of months for four categories of customers, and the granularity of the query is customer group / yearmonth. The query includes this filter:

[Sales Outstanding].[Customer DSO Dimension].[Category DSO] in ('Wholesalers', 'Hospitals', 'Pharmacists', 'Veterinaries')

Whereas the Excel 2007 output gives me correct results, the chart when output to PDF or HTML includes a fifth category whose name is that of the measure, and whose amount is the sum of the four real categories.

View Tabular Data confirms that my filter is working - my query returns only the four categories. I've documented this issue with screenshots (see attachment). All screenshots were taken from the same background execution of the report.

Does anyone have an idea what's going on here?

TIA
Michael
Title: Re: Chart output in .xlsx is different from PDF & HTML - SOLVED
Post by: Michael75 on 17 Jul 2013 08:27:23 AM
I'd struggled with this one for some time before posting to Cognoise, yet five minutes later it was solved. It involves a gotcha. In the Series part of my chart, I for some reason had a blank --> Drop Item here above the item I use as a series. Deleting this resolved the problem - the chart is now correct in all three output formats.

I'm sure there's someone here who can explain convincingly why Excel handled this little error better than the other formats  ;D