Intelligent printing in SAP BO Dashboards

The Print button component in SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 (Xcelsius) has a pretty basic functionality: It prints your complete dashboard; it’s all-or-nothing. The only setting you can make is whether the dashboard should be scaled to fit the page or to a certain percentage. After clicking this print button the standard Windows print window appears where you can select a printer and start printing. So yeah, that’s pretty basic stuff.

I want to share a quick preview of the upcoming Dash Printer Add-on for SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards by Data Savvy Tools, which seems to be what the Print button should have looked like. With this add-on the dashboard user is free to select the exact output he wants to get printed. So if only a certain chart or table of the dashboard should be printed, we now can select this area, snap a picture of it and print it. I like the queueing features which lets you snap multiple screenshots before the actual printing starts. You can change the print order and set some layout and formatting options.

There is also a feature that lets you change the state of the dashboards without leaving the selection mode by holding the CTRL-key. On my Mac this gives a problem, because CTRL-click still is recognized as right-clicking the mouse. This is one of the things left from the one-buttoned mouse era the Mac was in until some years ago. Luckily the Mac Command-key does the same trick.

Try this handy add-on below or check the Data Savvy Tools website for more info. You can also watch a video below which demonstrates all features for you. (more…)

New GMaps Plugin v2 for Xcelsius try-out

This summer Centigon Solutions released the latest version of their Google Maps add-on for Xcelsius (uh, SAP Crystal Solutions Presentation Design…). Although I liked the first version of this add-on, I really missed an option for showing regional alerts. You still had to use the standard Xcelsius map-components which did support this feature.

In this post I will show the steps you have to take to create a dashboard showing a Google Map with regions that have alert colors and are clickable with some drill-down functionality like the example below.

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