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

Debugging your spreadsheets


It is common that Dashboard Design developers may accidently put in the incorrect formula when developing logic on their spreadsheets. Using the Ctrl+` hotkey will make things much easier.

How to do it...

  1. Select the worksheet you want to see formulas for.

  2. Hit the Ctrl key and ` (grave accent) key together.

  3. You will see the value in the cell change to the formula.

How it works...

The hotkey Ctrl +` works by showing the underlying formula of a cell. This is extremely useful if you are comparing formulas from multiple cells, the reason being that the developer does not have to flip between formulas in order to see what they are doing wrong when comparing multiple cells. Developers can quickly analyze their worksheet and find the cause of their problem quickly.

The following screenshot shows the results of two Excel formulas in cells A1 and A2:

After using the Ctrl+ ` hotkey, the formulas of both cells are displayed as you can see in the next screenshot:

There's more...

An alternative way to accomplish the same task is to go to the Formulas tab and then click on Show Formulas. Refer to the following screenshot: