Migrating a spreadsheet to IBM Cloud with Dashboard visualizations

3 min readDec 30, 2020

If you are using a spreadsheet to manage your business’ data you may want to upgrade your setup by migrating the data (and analytics) to the cloud.

One great option to do this is using the IBM Cloud service.

You can sign up for a free account on https://cloud.ibm.com/registration/. At least at the moment free accounts doesn’t require you to enter a credit card to register, and it is free for an unlimited amount of time (and also offer free plans for their services).

We will demonstrate how to migrate an existing spreadsheet to the cloud and add the visualizations.

For this exercise we will use Netflix’s tv-shows and movies data.

Step 1: Creating a Watson Studio instance

Click the “Add resource” button on your dashboard.
Search for “Watson Studio” if not in recommended and select it.
Scroll down and click “Create”.
Wait until it’s done, click “Get Started”, and wait until everything loads up.

Step 2: Creating a Project and Cloud Object Storage

On the Watson Studio overview click “Create Project”
Click on “Create an empty project”
Name the project
On the section “Define Storage” click “Add” to create a new Cloud Object Storage
In the newly open Cloud Object Storage tab click “Create”
Click “Refresh” to select the newly created storage
Click “Create” and wait until it’s finished

Step 3: Uploading the dataset

On the project page click on “Assets”
On the “Data” section you can click on “browse” to select a file on your system or just drag your file.
Then just wait until it’s finished.

Step 4: Creating an IBM Cognos Dashboard instance

On the project page click on “Add to project”
Select the option “Dashboard”
Name the Dashboard as you please
Click on “Associate a Cognos Dashboard Embedded service instance”
On the new tab click on “New service”, select the option “IBM Cognos Dashboard Embedded” and click “Create”
Select the newly created instance of Cognos Dashboard and click “Associate service”
Click “Reload”
Select one again the instance of Cognos Dashboard and click “Create”
Finally, choose a template for the Dashboard

Step 5: Connecting the dataset to the Dashboard

On the dashboard’s page click on “+” to add a source
Select “Data assets” and select your uploaded file
Click “Select”

Final Step: Creating visualizations

Finally, you can select from a wide variety of graphs to add to your dashboard. Once you selected the graph you want, you can connect to it columns from your dataset to give them life.

In this example I add a pie chart to display the different ratings that the movies have, a columns graph to display the release years of the movies and a second pie chart to display the type of movie (movie or TV-show).

And that’s it! Hope it’s been helpful.