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 tree map


  • The tree map visualizes values by dividing an area into a set of rectangles. The following image shows an example of a tree map:

As you can see, two variables are used in this chart—one variable expressed by the relative size of each rectangular and another one illustrated by the color intensity. Instead of using the tree map, you can also choose the XY chart to display two variables in one chart.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we can re-use the file we created in the Using the XY chart recipe.

How to do it...

  1. Drag a Tree Map component to the canvas.

  2. Enter a name for the chart.

  3. Bind the cell range A4 to C9 to the By Range field.

  4. Select Data in Columns.

  5. Select By Series and bind the Name field to cell A1.

  6. Go to the Appearance tab and select the Series sub-tab.

  7. Select a very dark color as High Color and a very light color as Low Color.

  8. Preview the dashboard to check the result.

How it works...

The tree map arranges the rectangles from big to small. The Cat 5 data (most expensive houses...