Truncating labels in a crosstab

If you are tight on space when designing a report with Cognos Report Studio, you might want to show only a fixed amount of characters for every product/customer or what ever else you have in the rows of your crosstab in order to save some space.

You can go with the complicated ways of displaying caption of a member that is substringed... It is just as overcomplicated as the previous sentance sounds plus if you have additional functions to create the sets of members (like top/bottom counts etc.) fetching the caption might become even more tricky. And all this just to shorten the labels?!

The quick and easy way out of it is to unlock your report studio (that little lock button in the toolbar, you know) and click on the row item of the crosstab so that just the data item itself is selected, not the whole cell. Should look something like this:

Now scroll down the properties window till you find General section. There is only one property there- 'Maximum Characters'. Just type in the number and all row item labels will be cut off after x amount that you have specified. This means that a customer that has a full name of '153235 - Very Good Customer' with 15 as a value for Maximum Characters will look like so: '153235 - Very G'.

Yes yes, it could get a bit cryptical, but if you are trying to squeeze this into some dashboard, this could be a good solution; especially if you add a drill-through to some more detailed report on the customer!

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