CF Expansion Pack™

CF Expansion Pack for Excel™

The CF Expansion Pack for Excel simplifies many of the complexities associated with creating, editing and maintaining financial reports. As an extension to Cognos Finance, the CF Expansion Pack for Excel provides functionality that automates many of the manual processes associated with report development and maintenance.

Features and Functionality

The CF Expansion Pack for Excel is designed to substantially improve the reporting experience within Excel, and it includes the following benefits:

• Import of CF Input and Report templates (LIF, LRF) into MS Excel directly, leveraging native CF functions within Excel to retrieve, view and update data.
• Report Wizard, which provides the ability through a wizard directly within Excel to select rows, columns, pages and filters.
• Drill functionality within Excel, much like the drill functionality in CF Reporting and Input modules.
• Metadata List Generation, which complements the Report Wizard and enables you to create drop down lists of the various components so that you can change the report results based on changing the drop down list
• Workbook Update Scheduler, which is a wizard to create a windows scheduled task to open any Excel workbook and update the results from a specified CF system.
• Workbook Auditing, which generates an audit report from CF workbooks in Excel
• Error Checking within Functions inside an Excel workbook, which identifies all CF functions that are in error.

To use CF Expansion Pack you must have:

• Windows 2000 or higher (XP, 2003, etc.)
• Microsoft .NET 2.0, which is freely available from Microsoft if you do not already have it as part of any current software application installed on your machine
• Proper Windows user permissions to install software
• Access to Cognos Finance 7.3 or higher
• Microsoft Excel 2000 or higher

The CF Expansion Pack for Excel can be demonstrated onsite or via a web meeting. To arrange a product demonstration, please contact us.