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

Using Play Selector/Play Control


The Play Selector component can be used when you want to change chart values or components on a dashboard without having the user do anything. Some common uses where we need an automatic change of components are listed as follows:

  • A company dashboard presented on a large LCD monitor in a company common room. This dashboard will refresh or switch views every 20-30 seconds.

  • A dashboard at a technical support office that shows information on calls coming in and how they are being handled. This dashboard changes views every 20-30 seconds.

In this recipe, we will create a play selector that changes the image every 20 seconds. We can pretend that the images are different dashboards.

Getting ready

Have a set of three images ready on the canvas and overlay them on top of each other.

Tip

There are three dashboard images that you may use for this example. They are hr1.png, hr2.png, and hr3.png, and can be found in the images folder.

How to do it...

  1. Drag a Play Selector component...