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

Exporting to a standard SWF, PPT, PDF, and so on


After developing a Visual Model on Dashboard Design, we will need to somehow share it with users. We want to put it into a format that everyone can see on their machines. The simplest way is to export to a standard SWF file.

One of the great features Dashboard Design has is to be able to embed dashboards into different office file formats. For example, a presenter could have a PowerPoint deck, and in the middle of the presentation, have a working dashboard that presents an important set of data values to the audience. Another example could be an executive level user who is viewing a Word document created by an analyst. The analyst could create a written document in Word and then embed a working dashboard with the most updated data to present important data values to the executive level user.

You can choose to embed a dashboard in the following file types:

  • PowerPoint

  • Word

  • PDF

  • Outlook

  • HTML

Getting ready

Make sure your visual model is complete and ready...