As a content viewer, it’s common to end up analyzing a dashboard that looks different from what was originally shared. This is a result of one of several factors such as changing measure input controls, page filters, or story filters. As a result, users end up having to constantly change filters each time they open a story within SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), wasting precious time, and manual effort. What many fail to realize is that SAC actually allows users to easily access frequently used scenarios with Bookmarks. With just a few clicks, you can save the state of input controls, charts, tables, and filters and revert to them when needed. Additionally, you can easily toggle between several scenarios by creating multiple bookmarks. This blog will describe how to implement the bookmark functionality in SAP Analytics Cloud.
Let’s put this into perspective. Imagine that you are in charge of a number of different states within the United States and today, you only want to look at your assigned states in the West region. Instead of having to select each state over and again, or asking the content creator to save you a separate version, you can bookmark the story and set it as the default view. As a result, the next time you log into SAC and open this particular story, it will automatically set the filters to what you had originally bookmarked.
Chart Scaling
If you’re a content creator, you may have noticed that when you are consuming the measures, whether they are the same or different across visualizations or at times within the same visualization, the scale of the measures are different. As a result, you may end up making the wrong decision.
SAP Analytics Cloud provides you the ability to scale measures. For example, in the dashboard below, we are analyzing revenue for different products. As they are being analyzed for different visualization, both bars look the same even though the values are different. As a result, I can scale the measure so that I can better analyze my data across different charts.
IBCS
International Business Communication Standards (IBCS) are practical proposals for the design of reports, presentations, dashboards, and the diagrams and tables contained therein. According to IBCS, your business communication meets the IBCS standards when it complies with the rules of the seven components that form the acronym SUCCESS:
Say
Unify
Condens
Check
Express
Simplify
Structure
The SUCCESS formula is then applied and forms three chapters of the IBCS Standards:
Conceptual rules help to clearly relay content by using an appropriate storyline.
Perceptual rules help to clearly relay content by using an appropriate visual design.
Semantic rules help to clearly relay content by using a uniform notation (IBCS Notation).
Whether reporting or presenting, the goal of these standards is to reduce your charts and tables to only the essentials, creating business transparency and allowing decision-makers to understand data in a more clear way to better navigate their business.
Sounds complex? Not to worry. SAP Analytics Cloud is IBCS certified, making it easy to create charts and tables that conform to IBCS standards, even applying certain standards automatically, improving your reports, dashboards, and presentations, and saving you time. SAP dives into more details on all 10 IBCS standards in these blogs:
Messages / Title
Time and Structure / Time Periods
Charts / Labels
Scenarios / Variances
Scaling / Highlighting
Expand Functionality with Market-Leading Capabilities
By uncovering all of the powerful capabilities of your SAP Analytics Cloud solution, you can gain end-to-end visibility of your operations to eliminate inefficiencies and empower your staff with the right information and tools to make smarter, faster decisions.
Want to learn about other helpful features that you may have missed in your SAP Analytics Cloud solution? Check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this blog series.
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