Posts by: Xavier Hacking
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.
Book review: Discover ABAP
I have been working with SAP BW for some years now and ABAP coding has always been a pain in the ass for me. Fact is, also within BW you can’t really get around without any ABAP knowledge. It is used to enhance data extractors, to transform the data within the BW data model (with the start, field, end and expert routines in transformations) and to create variables to make dynamic selections in queries, DTP’s and InfoPackages.
So most of the time I just looked at some pieces of existing code, copied it, searched Google or SAP Help, tweaked it a bit so it eventually did what I wanted it to do, and went on. Just like I managed to do this with html, php and other coding languages for the last 15 years. If things got too complex I turned to a ABAP-consultant who normally managed to solve these problems in a few minutes doing some magic tricks that always seem simple when you read the code afterwards.
Now I found this book Discover ABAP by Karl-Heinz Kühnhauser ($39,95) which promises to give you a 101 course on the ABAP basics for us n00bs, so I decided to try it. Although this book is on the market for a few years already I still want to acknowledge it here.
This book is easy to read, gives many many examples, explains every concept in details and keeps things simple to understand. Kühnhauser demonstrates how to get the data from tables, use variables, transform or modify values, make calculations with them, use internal tables and how to set up logical expressions. Furthermore the Function Modules are discussed and the book shows how you can use them in your code.
I think that over 70% of the book’s text consist of examples or explaining them (line by line!!) which is very important for newcomers. All features of the ABAP editor are explained and it shows you how to really use the Debugger.
Since I only want to use ABAP in the BW domain (no, I don’t have any ambition to be a ABAP programmer someday!) I could fast-read/skip most of the sections on the data dictionary, creating database tables and building selection screens. But I think still 80%+ of the book was useful for me.
The only thing I miss in this book is the follow up advice on where to go next if you want to learn more. But if you are curious about the basics of ABAP you should check out this book for sure!
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!
BI 2011 Amsterdam recap
Last week I attended the 3 day conference part of the SAPinsider BI2011 event in Amsterdam. Earlier I posted my expectations here so it’s now time for some evaluations.
Keynote
The conference started with a classic keynote with cameras, enormous screens, demos and some high-level managerial talks from Sanjay Poonen and Jason Rose. The only things I can remember from this were the various very cool iPad apps that were nicely demonstrated and that there were 1400 people attending the event (BI2011, HR2011, GRC2011 and Financials2011 combined).
Sessions
So I expected to hear some informative things in three areas at BI2011: HANA, SAP BW 7.3 and SAP HR reporting with SAP BW. The sessions for first two completely succeeded in this, the SAP HR reporting area on the other hand was a big disappointment. Based on the session’s descriptions I expected to learn more on SAP HR data in combination with SAP BW reporting, since this would be very helpful for my current project. Unfortunately only SAP queries where discussed in the first session and the second session just went through the standard BW tooling, without any actual reference to SAP HR data. Maybe my expectation level was completely off, but this was just a waste of time.
The sessions on BI4 that I attended (WebI & Analysis) could have been more detailed but were okay overall. The session on Crystal Report was cancelled last minute because the speaker couldn’t make it to Amsterdam in time. Too bad.
I loved those tips & tricks sessions! This is where you really learn things. Top two here were the session of Jesper Christensen on data load improvements and my final session on the last day by Shell on their experiences regarding the SAP BusinessObjects integration with SAP BW. Very good job guys!
