Book Image

SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook

Book Image

SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook

Overview of this book

Xcelsius 2008 was recently included in SAP’s BusinessObjects 4.0 family, rebranding “Xcelsius Enterprise” as “SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0”. With features like flexible design and what-if scenarios, the powerful dashboarding software allows enterprises to make business decisions at a glance, and this book allows you to go far beyond the basics of these techniques. This cookbook full of practical and applicable recipes will enable you to use the full latest capabilities of Dashboard Design to visually transform your business data. A wide range of recipes will equip you with the knowledge and confidence to perform tasks like configuring charts, creating drill- downs, making component colors dynamic, using alerts in maps, building pop-up screens, setting up What-If scenarios, and many more.The recipes begin by covering best practices for using the Dashboard Design spreadsheet, the data-model, and the connection with the components on the canvas, later moving on to some from-the-trenches tricks for using Excel within Dashboard Design. The book then guides you through the exploration of various data visualization components and dashboard interactivity, as well as offering recipes on using alerts, dashboard connectivity, and making the most of the aesthetics of the dashboard. Finally, the recipes conclude by considering the most important add-ons available for Dashboard Design and enabling you to perform relevant and useful tasks straight away.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Connecting to CSV-files with the CSV-connector


In Chapter 8, Dashboard Connectivity, we discussed a number of data connectivity options for Dashboard Design dashboards. In addition to these standard data connections, Centigon Solutions developed an add-on that allows us to use Comma-Separated Value (CSV) files to grab data from. This recipe will give you a quick walkthrough of the features of this add-on.

Getting ready

Go to the Centigon Solutions website (http://www.centigonsolutions.com/) and browse for the CSV connector. Download the free trial and install it with the Add-On Manager. You also need a sample CSV file to use in this recipe.

How to do it...

  1. Open a new Dashboard Design file and go to the spreadsheet area. Enter the location of the CSV file in cell C1.

  2. Open the Data Manager and click on the Add button. Under Add-On connection, you will see the CSV Connector. Select it.

  3. Give this connection a name. Bind the CSV Data URL field to cell C1.

  4. Also, check the Delimiter setting. This should...