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

Adding a MacOSX loading dock to your dashboard


It is well known that Macs have a great user interface and one of the great things they have in particular is the program loading dock. We can emulate this in Dashboard Design using the Fisheye Picture Menu. But why would someone want to use the loading dock? Well, you can use the loading to switch between dashboards on the main dashboard. You can use it to open up another dashboard, or you can use it as a selector to change your charts or data. In this recipe, we are going to emulate the swapping between dashboards.

How to do it...

  1. Select the Fisheye Picture Menu selector.

  2. We'll need to link an image of each dashboard to the Fisheye PictureMenu . To do this, press the Import button on the Images | Embedded section of the fisheye menu properties. In our example, we are using three dashboards, so click on the Click to Add Images button to load each of the three dashboard images.

  3. Bind the Labels to the spreadsheet, as shown, so that the user knows...