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

Making tables look pretty


With Dashboard Design 2008, we are able to create tables that look just like a table in an Excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately, our everyday tables look quite bland. If we start off with a default spreadsheet table, it will look kind of like this:

It looks okay, but with the help of some Dashboard Design objects, we can spice it up to look much more attractive.

Getting ready

Prepare the data on your Excel spreadsheet and set up a table like in the previous image.

How to do it...

  1. Change the theme to Aero.

  2. Select the first Background object from the Art and Backgrounds tab from the Category window.

  3. Place the background so that it is under the table.

  4. Select the Rectangle object from the Art and Backgrounds tab and place it under the body of the table to give it a background color.

  5. Select the Rectangle object from the Art and Backgrounds tab and place it on top of the header and give it a linearly gradient background color. This will be the background for the table title.

  6. Select...