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

Alternative hierarchy selection method


When navigating through a hierarchy selection, it is often that a user wants to see a list of available parents or children instead of only being able to see one at a time when looking at drop-down filters. Here is an alternative using the more complex listbox breadcrumb type approach for three levels:

Getting ready

Set up the data as shown next. The blue section contains the initial full hierarchical data. The yellow section contains each breadcrumb trail whose source is one column less than the parent. More about how everything works will be explained in the How it Works section.

How to do it...

  1. Insert three List Box selectors onto the canvas. On the first List Box selector, set the Labels to the Region, Column A, in blue.

  2. Select Filtered Rows as the Insertion Type and set the Source Data to columns A to C. Set the Destination to columns E to G. Notice that we select all three source columns because the first row of the first column of the destination...