How to enable Microsoft Excel Filter

[rocket21]

Our userbase loves Excel and wants Cognos to provide pushbutton reports that allow them to do further analysis in Excel.  As a result, when they select the Microsoft Excel Format output in Cognos, they want a spreadsheet to pop up with the column headers already set to Filter (ie the pull down menus in Excel that you trigger via the Sort & Filter -> Filter command in Excel 2010).

I've found virtually no information on how to accomplish this in Cognos.  I did find a blogpost, where it was suggested to insert two HTML items into the report (before and after the list element).  I cannot get this to work and I saw a reference elsewhere that others can't get this to work on 10.X

Any suggestions on how to meet this requirement?

[calson33]

Create an excel template with all the extras, and then have them import the data into this template file.

Make the template file read only so that they have to copy or use "save as" so you don't lose the template.

[rocket21]

One of the main reasons the client wants filters in the Excel is that the users of the file need it to be fast and convenient.  They want the files pushed to the via e-mail and ready to go.  The client wanted Cognos to get out of the business of having ops people manually generating and sending the reports out to the userbase.

[calson33]

No idea then, other than yet another product:
http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/cognos-analysis-ms-excel/

[BigChris]

I completely take your point about the userbase wanting to use Excel, but have you tried building the filtering into the cognos report? That way you could let the users filter to their heart's content in Cognos then export the filtered results to Excel...just my 2p worth.

[rocket21]

I completely take your point about the userbase wanting to use Excel, but have you tried building the filtering into the cognos report? That way you could let the users filter to their heart's content in Cognos then export the filtered results to Excel...just my 2p worth.

We've done that for the core userbase that has Cognos access, however there is a separate userbase in a separate organizations that does not have Cognos access.  The core userbase presently manually sends spreadsheets to the other organizations.

I'm still curious if there's a way to get that HTML element coding working, as seen here:  http://karimkhalifa-bi.blogspot.com/2012/07/adding-automatic-filters-to-excel.html.

What I'm noticing in tests is that HTML elements (such as a simple one that just says 'text') aren't working in View in Excel 2002 Format, View in 2007 Format, or even View in csv.  Is this something that was lost in 10.X?