Hiding Crosstab row titles in Cognos 8.4

Since 8.3, the (Don’t Print) global class still reserves a full width space for the title object, even if the text is not displayed. One method is to set ‘Box Type’ to ‘None’ but that can mess up alignment with the column headers if you have nested row levels to hide. Hopefully this will be fixed in the next version of Cognos.

Workaround:

1. Click the column/row header and set the ‘Source Type’ property to ‘Text’. This creates a null string so it measures zero length of space to reserve.

2. In Page Explorer, go to the ‘Classes’

3. Create a new local class and name it. I named mine ‘Cloak of Invisibility’.

4. Highlight that class and set the Properties as follows:
Border: ? None ?
Set by going into another dialog box, choosing None and applying.
Padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px
Size & Overflow:
Height: 0px
Width: 0px
Content is clipped: Selected
Visible: No

5. SAVE NOW! I save as ‘reportname_before_hiding’ Once you proceed, headers will be hidden in the report ‘Page Design’ view and can only be edited in the ‘Page Structure’ view.

6. Remove the Crosstab corner.

7. Go back to page view and select all row headers to be hidden.

8. Apply the ‘(Don’t Print)’ class and ‘Cloak of Invisibility’ class.

9. Save a final version of the report.

Run as HTML and the header is hidden but still takes up a small amount of space.
Run as PDF and the header is removed.