SAP Lumira, Discovery edition – The Comprehensive Guide (SAP Press) now available!

Posted by on Apr 1, 2018

This week we officially presented the first copy of SAP Lumira, Discovery edition – The Comprehensive Guide by SAP Press to Merlin Knott (SAP VP of Sales for Analytics North Europe) at the SAP Hybrid Analytics knowledge event organized by SAP Netherlands and Interdobs.

SAP Lumira, Discovery edition – The Comprehensive Guide is now available for purchase via SAP-Press.com and Amazon and can be ordered as hardcopy, DRM-free ebook or bundled editions. Personally I see the bundled edition at SAP Press as the best deal, as it gives you the hardcopy to read, and the PDF ebook as a reference for when you are on the road or when you want to check out the full color screenshots.

The book covers all the new features from the very recent 2.1 release of SAP Lumira, Discovery edition. It offers a lot of value for those who are new to the tool, as well as for those who have used SAP Lumira 1.x in the past.

We make sure that beginners are brought up to speed in a very fast way, by offering easy to follow, step-by-step instructions on how to create a “story” and perform tasks in the tool. The datasets that are used in the chapters can be downloaded from the SAP Press book page, so the reader can follow along with the examples throughout the book. We use hundreds of detailed screenshots to further explain the Lumira Discovery concepts and features.

For readers with experience in SAP Lumira 1.x we make sure that the transition to 2.1 is as smooth as can be. The book describes the completely new Lumira Discovery 2.x user interface and its new way of working. We extensively discuss the different offline and live data scenarios and give a complete overview of all the data analysis, data manipulation and visualization options the tool has to offer. In addition, the installation and setup of both the client tool and BI Platform server add-on are described in detail. At the end of the book we discuss several interoperability scenarios to extend Lumira Discovery stories in SAP Lumira, Designer edition.

A reading sample, the full table of contents and the index can be found here. In the below video, co-author Martijn van Foeken and I further discuss the book:

SAP Lumira, Discovery edition – The Comprehensive Guide [SAP Press]
Xavier Hacking, Martijn van Foeken
498 pages, 2018
E-book formats: EPUB, MOBI, PDF, online
ISBN 978-1-4932-1613-0

SAP-Press.com
Amazon

Posted in: Books, SAP Lumira, Video

Coming soon: SAP Lumira, Discovery Edition – The Comprehensive Guide

Posted by on Jan 5, 2018

Big news, as I am very happy to announce our newest SAP Press book: SAP Lumira, Discovery Edition – The Comprehensive Guide. For this book I teamed up with my Interdobs colleague Martijn van Foeken (@mfoeken), who is a seasoned SAP BusinessObjects specialist with over 10 years of hands-on experience.

The major SAP Lumira 2 release of last summer brought so many changes and that much new stuff to the toolset, that we decided to not just update the existing “Getting Started with SAP Lumira” book from 2015 (based on SAP Lumira 1.18, ‘member?), but to start all over again. Our book will cover the recent SAP Lumira 2.1 update as well. In the weeks towards the release date, I’ll share some more details on the exact content and what you can expect to learn from this book.

The book will be available at SAPPress.com and Amazon, probably by the end of this quarter, in ebook, print and bundled editions.

SAP Lumira, Discovery Edition – The Comprehensive Guide
475 pages, 2018
E-book formats: EPUB, MOBI, PDF, online
ISBN 978-1-4932-1613-0

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Posted in: Books, SAP Lumira

Book review: SAP BusinessObjects Analysis Office – The Comprehensive Guide

Posted by on May 24, 2017

With all the buzz around the big upcoming Lumira 2 release, you would almost forget that there are other SAP BI tools in the market as well. For example Analysis for Office: the successor of the good old BEx Analyzer. For some reason these tools have never been a very popular topic to write about. This is somewhat strange, as Analysis for Office, and even BEx Analyzer, are still extremely popular under SAP BI customers and therefor widely used besides the ’newer’ front-end tools.

Analysis for Office is not a difficult tool to learn, but it has a lot of hidden, unknown and even misunderstood features that are very useful for data analysts. My head still explodes when I see somebody using Analysis for Office to ‘download’ all the data into Excel, manually copy/paste the results to different tabs, and starts applying Excel filters, sorting etc. So there is absolutely a need for guidance here.

Luckily, Tobias Meyer published SAP BusinessObjects Analysis Office – The Comprehensive Guide last year on version 2.3, and this year an updated version on Analysis for Office 2.4. The book covers all the features that Analysis for Office (both the Excel and PowerPoint versions) offers in detail, but goes a lot further than that. Ever heard about Shortcut properties for the Analysis for Office add-on launcher?

afobook

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Posted in: Analysis for Office, Books

Interdobs Book Launch SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio – The Comprehensive Guide

Posted by on Apr 12, 2016

End March we had very nice book launch event for SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio – The Comprehensive Guide. It was hosted by Interdobs at SAP Netherlands.

Rolf Hichert gave an interesting lecture on data visualization and his IBCS standard. Dwain and Jeroen discussed the history and current state of Design Studio, and I told the story of why and how this book was created.

Check the photo album on Facebook and some of the Tweets:

SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio – The Comprehensive Guide

Geplaatst door Interdobs BV op vrijdag 1 april 2016

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Posted in: Books, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio

Available soon: SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio – The Comprehensive Guide Audiobook

Posted by on Apr 1, 2016

audiobook3As you may know I’m a big fan of podcasts and audiobooks, so I’m extremely happy to announce the unabridged audiobook edition of our recently released book SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio – The Comprehensive Guide.

In this audiobook we take you on a 37 hour non-stop journey through all the aspects of Design Studio. From the tool architecture, developing your first app, using JavaScript and CSS, until custom component creation with the SDK; everything is covered!

So are you going on a business trip or commuting to work? Be smart and use your traveling time to learn by simply listening to this audiobook on your mobile phone. You’ll be a Design Studio expert before you arrive!

Or, maybe you are training for a marathon and going on some very long runs? Instead of listening to the same music over and over, take this audiobook with you and get smart while getting fit! You’ll be sure to go for that extra 10K round!

Don’t worry about missing anything out of the hardcover version. A PDF-file with screenshots and other images will be made available and the narrator will make additional references when required.

We are currently working on the final recordings and edits. You can listen to the 5 minute sample below to get an idea. The audiobook will be available soon.


 

Edit 2 April 2016: Just to be sure: April Fools! 😉

Posted in: Books, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio