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

Acknowledgement

Writing this book has been a long journey and would not have been possible without the guidance, inspiration, and mentorship provided by many others along the way. From here, I'd like to show appreciation to all those who have assisted me along the path.

First, of all I would like to thank the Dashboard Design developers for their efforts in bringing us new features and fixes with every new version of Dashboard Design.

I would like to thank everyone in the Dashboard Design community for their contributions in SDN, LinkedIn, and blogs. Without the community, we wouldn't have anywhere to look for help when coming across a problem. In addition, thoughts and ideas are taken into account by the development team to create a better product in the long run. A big thanks goes to Kalyan Verma for giving me the opportunity to contribute on his blog http://myxcelsius.com and really getting me kick started with community participation (Excellent Job on getting myxcelsius.com to where it is today!). Another big thanks to Mico Yuk of Everything Xcelsius for her past advice and really getting the community involved with Xcelsius.

I'd like to thank Xavier Hacking for co-authoring the book. Without Xavier's teamwork, knowledge, and expertise, this book would not have been a success. I would also like to commend his great work on his blog @ http://www.hackingsap.com.

A big thanks to the Packt Publishing team (Stephanie Moss, Leena Purkait, Reshma Sundaresan) for providing all the necessary guidance in our writing process. Without the Packt Publishing team, this book would not have been possible.

Finally, I'd like to acknowledge Ryan Goodman for inspiring me to participate in blogging and assisting the community on Business Intelligence best practices and solutions.