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 panel container


The panel container component is useful if a designer thinks that a set of item(s) is too large for the canvas and wants to be able to scroll the inside of the canvas. A good example would be a scrolling set of charts. Let's say real estate on the dashboard was an issue and we had many charts that needed to be shown but it was not mandatory to show all charts on one view. If we put it in a panel container, we can scroll through each chart kind of like a slide show.

How to do it...

  1. Select the Panel Container from the Containers tab.

  2. Insert a set of charts (these can be any type of charts that you wish to insert) inside the panel container.

  3. Shrink the panel container so that it doesn't take up too much real estate on the dashboard. You can do this by hovering your mouse to the edge of the panel and resizing from there.

How it works...

In our example, we were able to emulate a slideshow of charts. This is useful if the charts do not need to be visible in one screen all together...