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Dashboard Essentials
Presented by: David Lai
Date: April 13, 2011
Introduction
David Lai
SAP Business Objects Consultant
SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards Enthusiast
Author of web blog http://www.davidlai101.com/blog and coauthor of
http://www.myxcelsius.com
Co-author of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook.
Rebranding of Xcelsius
Xcelsius in its original conception was a way to build visualizations and
dashboards using Excel data.
As Xcelsius evolved, the name no longer became relevant in the SAP
product line
Thus SAP felt it would be better for customers if Xcelsius was to be
rebranded as SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards
Agenda
Common issues that dashboard designers are faced
with
Data connectivity
External 3rd party addons
Query Browser (New BI4 feature)
Dashboard resources
Q&A
Data Connectivity
SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards
can connect to 12 different types of
data sources
12 Connectivity Options
Non-BO
BO Enterprise
Enterprise
With QaaWS we can use ETL but that would require extra data
maintenance and universes/universe objects which some organizations are
not okay with.
Great for rapid development as we dont have to wait for ETL resources to
complete the ETL work
Crystal Reports
Crystal Reports can be utilized when there is no Universe
Keeps Data Logic in the data layer so that database handles all the
number crunching through the ETL
Dont have to maintain Live Office connections on the Excel
spreadsheet
Less overhead on the dashboard source file
BI Web Services
On SAP Business Objects XI 3.1, you can only use Web Intelligence rich
client to generate BI Web Services
On SAP Business Objects BI 4, you can generate BI Web Services from
Interactive Analysis (Web Intelligence web client)
In SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards and Life Cycle Manager, the BI Web
Service objects are treated as Query as a Web Service objects
When using Live Office, use as little live office connections as possible.
They take up a lot of overhead
Re-use dashboard components such as charts and selectors as much as
possible
Keep dataset sizes to a minimum. When you are going over 1500 rows, it
takes a significant amount of overhead.
Try to use formulas such as VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, SUMIFs, etc sparingly.
For VLOOKUPs you can use Filtered Rows instead.
Use & instead of Concatenate
Inovista Microcharts
Gmaps Plug-in
Query Browser
Bind directly to
query object
Multi Select without having to use the real estate hogging List Builder!