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

Scaling the y-axis


After binding a chart to a data set in the spreadsheet, Dashboard Design makes up a scale on the y-axis by default, based on the lowest and the highest values in the visualized data set. The problem with this auto scaling is that it creates a y-axis that doesn't start with 0, which may cause a bad interpretation of the data.

In the following image, the same results are presented in two bar charts. The chart on the left-hand side gives the indication that Product B has performed a lot better than Product A; the bar is more than two times as big! This is of course wrong, as the y-axis starts with $470,000. The chart on the right-hand side shows a version that is way more useful for analysis:

Getting ready

You can reuse any of the dashboards you already made with chart components. In this recipe, we will use the dashboard created in the Adding a Line chart to your dashboard recipe.

How to do it...

  1. Select the chart, go to the Behavior tab and select the Scale sub-tab. If your chart...