Or, make sure you define these calculations within the framework.
Not exactly an answer you were waiting for, but I just spend a lot of time figuring out how this works.
Defining 'straight' subtractions will have Cognos forcing you to activate local processing.
What it then returns is a Cognos datatype 'time value' that you can format.
For strictly whole days as outcome of the calc we reverted to first formatting the date to the julian day type and then subtraction (in our case Oracle). That does work with only database processing activated, but is not generic.
Ties Blom