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 the pie chart


The pie chart is circular chart divided in one or more slices. Each slice represents the proportion of a value to the total of all values. Pie charts can be used to show the impact of a value in contrast to other values or the grand total. However, it may be hard to compare the size of slices within a pie chart when there are more than three slices, or across other pie charts. Therefore, if you need to compare data, we recommend using the bar chart instead.

Getting ready

Open a new Dashboard Design file and enter the data into the spreadsheet, as shown in the following screenshot:

How to do it...

  1. Drag a Pie Chart component onto the canvas.

  2. Bind the Values field to spreadsheet cells B5 through B7.

  3. Bind the Labels field to cells A5 through A7.

  4. Bind the Chart field to cell A1 and the Subtitle field to cell B2.

  5. Preview the dashboard.

How it works...

We bound the fields from the General tab to the data in the spreadsheet making this chart to show the three labels and the according...