Book review: Reporting and Analysis with SAP BusinessObjects

For the past months I’ve been busy reading (and listening) a bunch of interesting tech books so it’s time for another review. It looks like SAP Press is updating its book portfolio this year, since after the Integrating SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.x with SAP Netweaver book I posted about in January we now also have a second edition of Reporting and Analysis with SAP BusinessObjects, and in April the successor to Creating Dashboards with SAP BusinessObjects is planned for release.

This is a good thing. We’ve seen lots of changes in just a few years; BI4 has been release, new product names are introduced, integration has been improved and so on. If you are just entering the new SAP BusinessObjects world and you would follow the ‘old’ books and documentation it would only get you confused and probably frustrated. We don’t need that. The book is updated for release 4.0 FP3.

So let’s have a look at this new Reporting and Analysis with SAP BusinessObjects book, which is again written by Ingo Hilgefort, who is one of the ultimate gurus on SAP BusinessObjects and SAP BW tooling and integration and has been blogging and writing books on these topics since SAP acquired BusinessObjects a few years back. Follow this guy if you want to keep updated and learn more.

This book is really an overall overview of the complete SAP BusinessObjects reporting portfolio. It starts with the basics by describing the different reporting capabilities in just a few pages. A lot of SAP BI consultants still can’t name the five main BI tooling areas so there is nothing wrong to start with this again. (more…)

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…)

Cookbook Tweetaway Winners

I want to thank everyone who participated in the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook Tweetaway contest over the last 2 weeks! Over 100 tweets have been sent.

Congrats to the 2 lucky tweeps who have won an eBook copy of the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook! The winners are @rodri_m_d and @montoyainigo. We’ll be contacting you guys shortly to give you your copies of the Cookbook.

Have fun baking!

SAP BO Dashboards cookbook Tweetaway

Okay guys, it is time to give some stuff away. On behalf of Packt Publishing we can give away two eBook copies of the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards cookbook we released a few weeks ago.

Joining this giveaway Tweetaway is easy: Just send out a tweet with a link to the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards’ cookbook page on PacktPub.com in it. You can use the share buttons on the cookbook page itself, or just click this link. Retweeting other tweeps is also allowed and you can tweet as much as you want.

On monday 25th July we will pick the two winners and grant them access to their free eBooks. Good luck!

Baking with the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards cookbook part 2

As you might know a few weeks ago the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 cookbook David Lai and I wrote was released by Packt Publishing. To give you an idea how the book is setup I am publishing some example recipes of this cookbook here on this blog.

Last week the first post in this short series contained two recipes from Chapter 2: Data Visualization, discussing Using the OHLC chart and candlestick chart and Sorting series.

Part 2 takes a look at Chapter 6: Advanced Components, with the recipes Using the grid component and Creating a slide show.

You can find more information on the book here and order it at Packt Publishing (no shipping costs and also eBook version available) or at Amazon.com.

Using the grid component

The grid component can display a table with data in your dashboard. Therefore it looks a bit like the list view and spreadsheet table components. There are a number of differences between these two sets of components, stated as follows:

• The list view and spreadsheet table components allow us to make data selections; the grid component does not.
• The grid component not only displays data, but its values can also be changed by the dashboard user.
• The grid component doesn’t have a header row.
• The grid component has the option to make use of alerts.

GETTING READY

Open a new dashboard design file and enter the values in the spreadsheet as shown in the following screenshot:

How to do it…

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