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

Grouping the canvas components


Canvas components can be grouped with one or more other components.

Getting ready

Drag several components to the canvas.

How to do it...

  1. Select the components that you want to group by either selecting them by dragging the mouse over the components, or clicking the components one-by-one while holding the Ctrl button on your keyboard.

  2. Right-click anywhere on the canvas and select Group from the context menu. You can also use the shortcut Ctrl + G to group these components. As you can see, the components are now a group with a common border (Dynamic Visibility and Entry Effect):

    And some shared preferences (Dynamic Visibility and Entry Effect):

  3. If you create a lot of groups of components, we advise that you name these groups to prevent you from getting lost and confused during the dashboard development. First go to the Object Browser.

  4. Select the group you want to rename.

  5. Double-click the group or right-click and select Rename from the context menu.

  6. Type in the new name for this group.

How it works...

When your dashboard gets more complex, not only will the data model in the spreadsheet grow, the number of components used on the canvas will also increase. Using groups to differentiate the canvas components from each other is a great way to stay in control of your dashboard.

There's more...

Besides browsing through your (grouped) components, the Object Browser has two additional options which come in very handy during the development of a complex dashboard.

Hiding components

Firstly, you can hide components and/or groups of components, which will make your life easier if you are using a lot of overlaying components. By checking Hide for some components, you won't be bothered by these components and you can work with the components that are unhidden.

Note

There is one thing you should keep in mind: If you hide a component that is part of a group and the group itself is unhidden, the complete group will still be movable and its properties will be changeable.

Locking components

Secondly, the Object Browser gives us the possibility to lock one or more components and/or groups of components. Doing this makes it impossible to select these components so it won't be possible to move, change, or do anything else with it.

Hiding or locking components is easy. In the Object Browser you will see two symbols with two columns of dots beneath them. The first column is the 'hide' column; the second one defines which components are locked. To hide or lock a component, you just have to click on the correct dot in the row of the component. The dot will be replaced with a checkmark. In the following screenshot, you can see that the Budget group is hidden while the Actual group is locked: