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 Filtered Rows


Filtered Rows was one of the greatest additions to Xcelsius 2008 (now SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0) from Xcelsius 4.5. If we look at the following figure, we have a set of Sales metrics that are grouped by Region and Office:

Let's say I wanted to be able to select a region and show a sales comparison chart between the different sales offices of that region. Before the advent of Filtered Rows, we would have to perform complex VLOOKUPs or have the result come back through a query every time a region is selected, which is very time consuming.

How to do it...

  1. We will use a Combo Box selector to choose the desired region.

  2. In the Combo Box selector properties, bind the Labels to the Region column circled in red.

  3. Select Filtered Rows as the Insertion Type. Bind Source Data to the area circled in red. The Destination will contain the chart values as well as the selected region.

  4. Bind the chart values to the Destination section from step 3.

How it works...

The Filtered Rows Insertion...