Table titles, a well hidden feature

Imagine that, a feature that is so well hidden, that I only found it after teaching Business Objects for four years. In fact, it has been in Business Objects ever since version 5 as far as I know.

Here’s the deal :

We want to show two values in a cross-tab. In this case, I took Sales revenue and Margin.

The way it shows, you can’t really make out what each number is. But there is a solution. Both in WEBI and DESKI, you can set an option. So, right-click the table and choose “Format Crosstab” if you’re in DESKI.

Now, you check: “Show Variable Header”.

There, the title is showing. (In a minute, I’ll show you how to center the year above those columns) But first, how do you do this in WEBI ?

In WEBI, on the Properties tab, you check “Show Object Name”.

So, how do we center the title ? Easy.First, we add a break to the year.

Next, we delete the extra columns, but because of a BUG, you can’t delete these columns if you try it in Rich Client. In stead, go to the properties and deactivate the footer on the break.

In DeskI, just delete the columns of course.

The last step is to Center values across the break as shown above. In DeskI, this is a property of the break, which you can set in Slice and Dice.

The result :

There, a clean table

Cheers

Peter De Rop