CSV Format

Reports saved in delimited text (CSV) format open in the application associated with the .csv file type, usually Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software, Microsoft Windows Wordpad, or Star Office. In IBM Cognos Business Intelligence, to generate report output in the CSV format, you must have execute and traverse permissions for the Generate CSV Output capability.

Reports saved in CSV format

are designed to support Unicode data across many client operating systems
are UTF-16 Little Endian data-encoded
include a BOM (Byte Order Mark) at the beginning of the file
are tab-delimited
do not enclose strings in quotation marks
use a new line character to delimit rows
show only the results of a report query. Page layout items, such as titles, images, and paramDisplay values do not appear in the CSV output.

You can modify the CSV output format to suit your environment. For more information about customizing the functionality of IBM® Cognos® software, see Modifying properties for the CSV output format.