Mixing unmerged dimensions in Web Intelligence

The concept of merging queries in Web Intelligence is quite simple, however once you have a requirement of mixing unmerged dimensions in an output table, this is when it gets messy! Let’s take a look at the 2 sample queries below: Query #1 (Sale Revenue by Year): Year, Quarter, Sales Revenue Query #2 (Quantity Sold by State and Year): Year, State, Quantity Sold Each query contains two dimensions...

March 3rd, 2016 by Daniel Li 

SAP BusinessObjects Dashboard 4.1 Cookbook now available!

Time flies as the original cookbook which covered SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 has been in publication for almost five years. Xavier Hacking and I would like to give a Big Thank You to those who have purchased and benefited from our original cookbook. We hope that it has proven to be a useful resource! Fast forward five years later and we are now proud to be releasing an updated version which...

April 6th, 2015 by David Lai 

Cascading Prompts in BOBJ Dashboards and WEBI

A cascading prompt, helps the user focus on values they want to include in the prompt without the need to go through every possible value. A great example comes from a list of cities around the world. Imagine if we had to go through a huge dropdown list every time in order to find our desired city. It would be much easier if we can first select a country, then province/state and then the city. This...

March 12th, 2015 by David Lai 

Embed horizontal bar charts in a spreadsheet table component

One of the important features that SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards lacks right now is to be able to embed charts in a table. This is a very powerful feature as we are able to present a lot of meaningful information with little real estate when embedding charts inside a table as shown below. In Xcelsius SP3, SAP took the first step in creating the scorecard component which allows embeddable trending...

February 5th, 2015 by David Lai 

SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards vs SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio

After working with both SAP Business Objects Dashboards and SAP Design Studio, and seeing the pros/cons of each tool, I’d like to give my 2 cents on both tools since many people are wondering what the difference is between the 2 tools. (more…)
November 13th, 2014 by David Lai 

My Xcelsius Rant – Is there any hope for SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards in the next little while?

In this article I’d like to express my concerns about SAP BusinessObjects Dashboard Design AKA Xcelsius for what I’ve seen in the last 2 years. With SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards FP3 I was hoping to see some light; unfortunately it’s been quite dismal. When I first started using Xcelsius in 2006, it was leading edge and produced dashboards that had the WOW factor that other dashboard...

June 18th, 2012 by David Lai 

Using Xcelsius and Webservices to insert comments into a database

A common request that I have seen with my clients, is the ability to enter comments into a dashboard and then view those comments when they re-open the dashboard in the future. Unfortunately Xcelsius does not have a native mechanism to send data back to the database, as a dashboard’s main purpose to read data and not write back to the database.  However, I do see the value in being able to persist...

January 26th, 2012 by David Lai 

BI Web Services presentation from SAP Inside Track 2011 now available for download!

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation on BI Web Services at SAP Inside Track Vancouver 2011! A replay of the presentation can be found at the following link => http://bit.ly/rkBU1p I’ve also attached the powerpoint presentation that you can download here  
October 3rd, 2011 by David Lai 

All you need to know about Open Document (opendoc) Part 2

I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately on how to setup opendocument (opendoc), so I’d like to post this tutorial on how to do so which works for Business Objects XI 3.1. Unfortunately my previous tutorial at http://davidlai101.com/blog/2008/11/04/all-you-need-to-know-about-opendoc/ only works with Business Objects XI R2 Please note that the tutorial was taken from SAP BusinessObjects...

September 29th, 2011 by David Lai