Get SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook for only $5/€4

Packt Publishing is having a holiday ebook sale this week. The offer is that you can get any ebook from their catalog for only $5/€4 when you buy 2 or more. So this is a good time to pick up the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook if you haven’t done that already!

Looking for a nice second book to complete the deal? Packt also has ebooks on Data Visualization, SAP HANA, SAP ABAP and some non-SAP Business Intelligence Tools (Cognos, Pentaho, Qlikview, Oracle BI etc.).

Packt eBooks are flexible and easy to use on any ebook reader or just on your computer:

• Download any version, any time, from your account on packtpub.com
•  Available PDF, ePub [Android, Kobo], Mobi [Kindle] – You can email it right onto your Kindle from your account
•  No DRM, meaning you can copy to any device, as often as you like
•  You can print, and copy and paste from the eBook directly.

This offer is available until Thursday 3rd Jan 2013.

Book review: 100 Things You Should Know about Reporting with SAP Crystal Reports

100 Things You Should Know about Reporting with SAP Crystal Reports by Coy Yonce has been on the market for over a year, but really hasn’t gotten a lot of attention yet. Maybe the reason is that Crystal Reports isn’t that new and interesting anymore compared to the other SAP BusinessObjects tools and solutions like HANA. Also there are already a lot of books published on Crystal Reports in the past 10 years. In the past months I had to create a series of Crystal Reports in a very short timespan so I decided to pick this book up for some quick tips that could save me some time.

The approach of the ‘100 Things’ series is very different from other SAP books. It won’t teach you the very basics of report creation and it won’t discuss every menu option available. Instead it covers 100 very practical tasks you might want to achieve in Crystal Reports and it shows you the steps to get them done. I like this approach, which falls within the same philosophy we used in our SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 cookbook. This means that some level of experience in using Crystal Reports is required.

I’ve been working with the ‘newer’ SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise 4.0 which is mainly aimed at report creation on top of SAP BW. This book is written for SAP Crystal Reports 2011 but I guess that over 90% of the material is usable in the Enterprise version without a problem.

Each tip starts with a short introduction or case to explain the purpose and goal of the tip. Next you are taken through the steps and code. I think that about 70% of the tips use some kind of code, but in most cases these are single line statements that are not that complex, so don’t worry. A tip covers 2 to 4 pages.

Some of the tips that I found interesting are:

• Suppressing duplicate rows
• Designing a cover page
• Creating a formula to calculate an average/minimum while ignoring zero values
• Showing visual indicators
• Creating tool tips
• Formatting dates in a chart
• Creating effective report templates

Also there are a bunch of tips that go beyond the standard Crystal Reports functionality and show some nice third-party solutions you can use in Crystal Reports, for example to create barcodes and QR-codes in your report.  The final 5 tips talk about monitoring and improving report performance.

So if you find yourself Googling a lot to make your Crystal Reports better you should really check out the table of contents of this book. If there is one tip in it you can use immediately I think this book is already worth the money.

100 Things You Should Know about Reporting with SAP Crystal Reports by Coy Yonce, ISBN 978-1592293902.

SAP Press finally goes e-reader!

As of this month SAP Press offers its books not only in paper and from its online library, but also in downloadable formats PDF, ePUB and Mobi.

I’ve read (and reviewed) a lot of the SAP Press books on SAP BI and most of them are really really good and worth the money because they save me a lot of time. I always make sure I also get the online version of the book too, so I have all the information accessible all the time to look up things when I’m on the job.

The online library feature is nice, but you always need an active internet connection and you can’t scroll through the books as fast as in a PDF-file on your local machine. So I’m glad they finally offer this most-wanted feature.

We are pleased to announce that more than 25 of our newest releases and most popular titles are available right now in multiple download formats. Going forward, ALL newly published titles will have e-book download formats available (in addition to print and online formats) upon publication.

SAP Press now offers the following digital formats:

PDF to run on Macs/PCs, desktops/laptops, iPhones/iPads and a multitude of other devices.
ePUB for tablets, mobile devices or eReader.
Mobi files can be read on any Kindle device.
The already available Online Library to be used within an Internet browser like Chrome or Safari.

These files are DRM free so you can use them really on any device. The only limitation is that you can only download each format 5 times and the file will have a digital watermark.

They eventually will also provide e-book version of older titles. If you haven’t ‘upgraded’ your print book to an online/e-book version you should hurry; next month they will kill this $10/20-upgrade option. I have no idea why.

Please note, codes printed inside books and free trials that have not been activated or upgraded will ALL expire after December 7, 2012. You must activate and/or upgrade by this date. Any unused codes or expired trials can no longer be utilized under any circumstances after December 7, 2012.

Check it at SAP-Press.com.

Book review: SAP HANA – An Introduction

One of the most anticipated SAP books of 2012 is finally here: SAP HANA – An Introduction published by SAP Press (who else). I had the pleasure to see both authors Bjarne Berg and Penny Silvia at last year’s European BI2011 event in Amsterdam. Looking back at their sessions this should be a quality book so my expectations were high.

My last attempt at diving into the HANA stuff was in August and didn’t end that well. After successfully setting up  our Amazon/AWS HANA box and installing the tools I got stuck at SAP HANA Studio. So let’s see if this book will really show me how this thing works.

SAP HANA – An Introduction is divided into two parts: First the What, Why and When and second the How. The What, Why and When part, which takes about a third of the 400 book pages, is all about explaining things. What is in-memory computing, what is big data and how does the HANA solution look like. Here I got some answers to some basic questions that I still had on HANA. For example what would happen with the data in case of a power failure (since all of your data is loaded in-memory). Another thing nobody could explain to me was the concept of working with column-based storage of data versus row-based storage, which is illustrated very well in this book.

SAP HANA comes in two versions: A Standalone version and a version for SAP BW. The book not only covers the technical requirements and differences on both versions, but also the required skills you’ll need in your project team to implement HANA for each option. About 50 pages are dedicated to HANA use cases for both versions and provides guidelines on how to fit HANA into your business strategy.

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Get SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 cookbook for FREE

Packt Publishing – the publisher of the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook I co-authored last year- is celebrating its 1000th book release this weekend. They have a very cool promotion that let’s you download one of their ebooks for free!

So if you haven’t picked up the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 cookbook yet, go to the Packt Publishing website, create an account and get the free ebook! This promotion ends on the 30th of September 2012, so make sure you don’t miss it!