Dynamic Visibility with SAP Design Studio

One of the features that made me fall in love with Xcelsius (Dashboards) back in the day was the ability to easily show and hide components based on selections made in other components.  Later on Xcelsius introduced the ‘Tabs’ component in 2008 and made life even easier for showing multiple components dynamically.  However, I still […]

Create Diagonal Lines with Sparkline Charts in SAP Dashboards

Glancing at the “Art and Backgrounds” category of components in Dashboards 4.0 or earlier versions of Xcelsius you may have noticed that there is a Rectangle, Ellipse, Horizontal, and Vertical Line components available to display on the canvas but no Diagonal Line. The first time I came across this omission was when a customer requested […]

Dashboard Tips & Tricks – Mouse Over Suffix

Have you ever needed to add a postfix to a number in a dashboard component? For example a user wants to add MT (Metric Tons) as a postfix to the numbers on a line graph Lets start with a basic line graph Mouse Over Values have a default number format of General There are several […]

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 Log Analysis – Useful Commands

Making log analysis easier with Unix commands A couple of weeks ago, I presented a webinar on the topic of analyzing logs for SAP BusinessObjects BI4. The objective for that webinar was to share my opinion of the skills and framework required for being successful at troubleshooting the BI platform with the assistance of logs. […]

End of the Road for Dashboards?

@ca_nicholls threw out an interesting tweet on August 1:

In memory capability will make dashboards obsolete, statement just made by SAP CEO Aus & NZ. Do you agree? I don’t.

This tweet has certainly piqued the interest of more than just a few at this point. It’s a pretty bold statement. Could it be a misquote? It’s possible. I definitely do not mean to discredit or disrespect @ca_nicholls in any way by that question, but let’s consider that he got it spot on…

For the record…I don’t think dashboards are going anywhere, but let’s talk about it.