{"id":2905,"date":"2015-10-29T07:32:21","date_gmt":"2015-10-29T06:32:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hackingsap.com\/blog\/?p=2905"},"modified":"2015-10-29T07:32:21","modified_gmt":"2015-10-29T06:32:21","slug":"sap-businessobjects-design-studio-1-6-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hackingsap.com\/blog\/sap-businessobjects-design-studio-1-6-preview","title":{"rendered":"SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio 1.6 Preview"},"content":{"rendered":"

SAP BusinessObjects\u00a0Design Studio 1.6<\/strong> is coming up later this quarter so it is time to do a little previewing! You can find the full roadmap for\u00a0Design Studio here<\/a>. Below I’ll discuss the highlights of all the new features that we can expect.<\/p>\n

New Scorecard component<\/h4>\n

Design Studio 1.6 brings a new component that we have seen before in Xcelsius (SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards): the Scorecard component, or formatted table. This component can display multiple visualizations on a single table row. A table can display multiple of these rows, for example for each product type or region a separate row. We can show simple numbers but also charts (micro charts\/trend lines without x\/y-axis). Exceptions as defined in the underlying BEx Query can be shown as trend icons, colored text or colored cell backgrounds.<\/p>\n

Very\u00a0very useful if you want to display a lot of performance indicators in a compact way. Should also be easy to develop as you now only need a single scorecard component to achieve this, instead of using multiple text, chart etc. components to to the same.<\/p>\n

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New Spreadsheet component<\/h4>\n

A bit of a surprise is this new Spreadsheet component. It has the same functionality as the Crosstab component, so it can display data and has a context menu with all the OLAP features (filter, sort etc.). Difference is that you can now copy and paste data to and from this component. This is meant for planning scenarios, where you have to enter values (the planning template also uses the spreadsheet component). Now you can copy the data from a\u00a0Design Studio app to Excel, make some adjustments there, and copy and paste them back into the spreadsheet component in the\u00a0Design Studio app and use the planning functionality to save the data. The component also really looks like a familiar spreadsheet environment as in MS Excel, so that is also a plus. There is no info on using formulas or such as we are used to in Excel.<\/p>\n

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Geo pie charts<\/h4>\n

You can now use custom point markers (images) in the\u00a0Geo Map component. Also pie charts can be plotted on the geo layers. Don’t use this, as pie charts suck.<\/p>\n

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Info charts + Chart feeding component<\/h4>\n

Design Studio 1.6 introduces a totally new charting component called the Info chart. The old chart component is still there, but for new developments we should use the new component. It has new chart types (bullet, combo, stacked), a context menu and support for BEx Query exceptions. It also supports the trellis chart feature we know from SAP Lumira, where you get multiple versions of the same chart to show\u00a0different parts of a dataset.<\/p>\n

The Chart feeding component lets the user set up a chart (Info chart) themselves on runtime.<\/p>\n

So it’s a bit weird that they introduce a new component instead of updating the existing one, but anyway, more consistency in looks and usability between different applications (Lumira\/Design Studio) is always a good thing.<\/p>\n

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More context menu options in cross tab\/spreadsheet<\/h4>\n

End users can now add an additional column to a table\u00a0with a different aggregation of a measure. These are the options:<\/p>\n