Common sense UI behaviour in #BO

So far, Business Objects has always behaved in a very common sense like way. This is the sort of behaviour, people have gotten used to over the years -- and I think, it was rather silly to remove some of it, in the latest installment of BusinessObjects WEBI and Rich Client.

Behaviour	DeskI XIR3	Webi &Rich Client XIR3	WEBI BI4	Rich Client BI R4
Double click the corner of a table to:
Get it's properties	Yes	No	No	No

I agree it is debatable, but:
In DeskI, a table had a table dialog to modify it’s properties and it was accessible through a double-click. Webi R2 and R3 did not have this dialog, since all properties had gone into a properties tab – that’s common sense.

With BI4 however, the properties-tab has disappeared again and has been replaced by a dialog. Then it would be common sense to have the double-click behaviour return as well.
I do like the improved dialog when entering a cell. The fact that the fx button is right there and then, is a charm.

Behaviour	DeskI XIR3	WEBI XIR3	WEBI BI4	Rich Client BI R4
Double click a tab of a report to
Rename the tab	Yes	Yes	No	No

A small thing, I agree, but it’s these sort of inconsistencies that can drive people mad.

Behaviour	DeskI XIR3	WEBI XIR3	WEBI BI4	Rich Client BI R4
Drag a tab of a report to
Move the tab	Yes	No	Yes	Yes

Nice addition. The visual que is a bit low-key, but it works fine.

Behaviour	DeskI XIR3	WEBI XIR3	WEBI BI4	Rich Client BI R4
Right-click a column to
Add a calculation	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Add a sort	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Manage sorts	No	No	Yes	Yes
Remove a Column	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Remove the contents of a column	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Add a Column	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Add a Row	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Remove a Row	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Remove the header	Yes	Yes	No	No
Get the properties of a table	Yes	No	No	No
Get the properties of a cel	Yes	No	Yes	Yes

Very happy with calculation in the right-mouse being back from the dead, but. It used to be stored in the Calculation Folder, which made sense. In Insert is just less intuitive (to me). I’m sure I’ll get used to that.

Adding the Sort to the right-mouse is a very nice addition – especially because it’s hard to find with the tabs. It’s located under Analysis. And if you had been adding Formatting rules (Alerters) before, it’s hidden behind that tab as well. (No, I don’t like the tab-menus.)

VERY HAPPY WITH MANAGE SORTS TO BE ADDED UNDER THE RIGHT MOUSE!!!

Getting the properties of a table means that you HAVE to right-click on the border. Right-clicking somewhere in the table won’t give you the properties of the table. Again something that can drive people mad.

Why the Circle-shape handles at the corners of a selected table ? That implies the table can be dragged larger at the corners – it can’t.

Behaviour	DeskI XIR3	WEBI & Rich Client XIR3	WEBI BI4	Rich Client BI R4
Right-click a table to
Get the properties of a table	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Align tables	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

The only objection I have here is the fact that you can no longer drag a selection. This is rather a step backwards. Ctrl-selecting two tables is a pain. Dragging is so much easier. I mean, it was even possible in the WEBI version of XI R3.. Why would you remove a behaviour that is SOOO standard.

Behaviour	DeskI XIR3	WEBI & Rich Client XIR3	WEBI BI4	Rich Client BI R4
Drag a column
To remove it	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
To move it	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
To set is as a header for crosstab	Yes	Yes	No	No

The delete button now removes, not the content of a cell, but the entire column. And the fact that you no longer can convert a table to a crosstab with the good old Click and drag is a bit sad. It used to dazzle my students who were used to the unwieldyness of Pivots in Excel.

Behaviour	DeskI XIR3	WEBI & Rich Client XIR3	WEBI BI4	Rich Client BI R4
Right click a header
To delete it	Yes	Yes	No	No

This is pretty annoying. If you want to remove a Header, you have to do it through the properties of the table. Or the buttonbar at the top. Yuck. And the funny thing is, it was there in Rich Client R3 and Webi R3. A further.. imperfection.. is the fact that it always says “Show header”and never: “Hide header” but I can live with that

Behaviour	DeskI XIR3	WEBI & Rich Client XIR3	WEBI BI4	Rich Client BI R4
The most important button should be BIG and in plain sight
Refresh	Yes	Yes	No	No
Modify Dataprovider	Yes	Yes	No	No

90% of the time,  people who use any kind of BI-tool will want to refresh their data. The button to do that job should at least be easy to find for people with glasses.

I’m not a big fan of the new Tab-interface – it feels more like a game of Memory to me but I’ll learn it. The most important buttons, the ones you need to have under your fingers all the time, should be available without entering into tabs. It should be at the top-level. Modify Dataprovider should be easy to find and big. (same for Bold, Italic, Underline and change colour tbh.)

Oh, and we lost the ability to create a query based on a Universe when not connected to a server. That too, seems to be something that should be fixed.


Conclusion

All in all, for a road-worn, weather-hardened Business Objects user, this new interface is quite a change. It has always had it’s own feel (remember the days when pressing delete on a table didn’t work and you had to press Shift-Delete?), but I think the devs have taken this one to a new level. Some changes (the tabs) seem to be a change for the sake of change. Others (like managage sorts) are quite a treat.

Still trying to get my head around #BI4, but so far, it’s been nice making it’s acquaintance, Even if I’m experiencing quite some resistance.

Peter

A Control Chart in Business Objects

This week, I read about Control charts on the Business Objects forum. I had not heard of the notion before, but of course, it didn’t take long to find more about it. WIKIPEDIA is your friend in times like these.
As it turns out, it is a line chart, enriched with a series of constants being:

• The mean or average
• The mean + and – twice the stdDev()
• The mean + and – three times the stdDev()

All of which can be done very easily.
When writing these functions, there are only two things you need to add to your calculations : “in body” and “in report”. I’m going to do this in Rich Client, but this works just as fine in any other version of SAP BusinessObjects.
The function for the mean looks like this :
=average([Sales revenue] in ([Month]) in Report (a variable which I call AverageSalesRevenue)
the function for the Standard deviation looks like
=stdDevP(<Sales revenue> in ([Month])) in Report (a variable which I call deviationRevenue)
please note that I’m using the stdDevP function and not the stdDev function, but that’s because I have all data accounted for. In case you made a random selection, you will need to use stdDev instead.

Basically, all you need to do is create 4 variables using the before mentioned functions.
1) [AverageSalesRevenue]+ ([deviationRevenue]*3) –> [AveragePlus3Deviations]
2) [AverageSalesRevenue] + ([deviationRevenue]*2) –> [AveragePlus2Deviations]
3) [AverageSalesRevenue] - ([deviationRevenue]*2) –> [AverageMinus2Deviations]
4)[AverageSalesRevenue] - ([deviationRevenue]*3) –> [AverageMinus3Deviations]
In View structure, it’s easy to add them to the linechart like such :

The rest is easy, just drag the documentation cells in place with formula :
="UCL:"+[average plus 3 deviations]
="Center line:"+[Average]
="LCL:"+[Average minus 3 deviations]

There, hope you enjoyed that,

Peter De Rop

Colouring alternating lines in Business Objects DeskI

This functionality exists by default in WEBI, but DeskI simply doesn’t have it:

But, as you can see, you can have it, if you really want to. Here is how :
First, we need to create a variable called linenumber, with the function :
=LineNumber() –1
The –1 is because linenumber also counts the header and therefore, starts at 2.
The second variable I create is called Even and the function is :
=Even(<linenumber>)
The rest is easy, create an alerter on that Even variable :

Easy
Enjoy


Peter De Rop

A Mini Chart in Business Objects WEBI

This is a nifty little trick you can pull with Business Objects WEBI. Yes, only WEBI-users will be able to do this, the new functions were only added in the WEBI version of Business Objects (but that includes Rich Client of course).

This is the end-result. In the column to the right of your numbers, you get some sort of a chart that shows the proportional importance of a number (to get this to work with negative numbers, you’ll have to complicate things somewhat)
In Excel, the function is =rept(“|”, yournumber) – in Business Objects, that function is called : Fill()
In this case, I also divided my numbers by 10000 to keep the charts inside the column.
So: =fill(“|”;[Sales revenue]/10000).
Ah, I set the fontsize to 5, to make it even better.
Short and sweet, don’t you think
Enjoy,


Peter De Rop

Stopping gaps in Business Objects Charts

This is a classic.When you’ve been creating charts in Business Objects, you know about this one. Let’s start by looking at the data we would want to present in a chart:

As you notice, there are a few months missing. They’re simply not there because we didn’t sell that particular product in that particular month at all. Still, we wish to present the data in a line-chart and display a line across those missing months, without leaving a gap.

For you WEBI users, we have a solution.

The only solution is adding a second query to your report, where you have all 12 months.

In your query editor, click : Add Query and select only the month dimension.

Once you did that and you added the month to the chart (instead of the month from the first query)

your Chart will look like :

Not much of an improvement.

This is what it looks like in WEBI

and with the extra query added :

 

For now, in DeskI, this is how far you could get. The only Solution that remains for DeskI is to calculate the rest of the chart by hand (which is what i will show in a next blogpost. In WEBI however, we have a much better solution : the function “interpolation”.

=Interpolation([Sales revenue])

Obviously, the numbers we get this way are fictious. They just serve to close the gap on the chart. It’s clearly the purpose to use the previous display of the data, but we use these numbers for our chart – this results in :

And we have a much cleaner chart.

Hope you find this useful.

Oh, and Mind the Gap

Cheers,

Binabik

Installing BOXIR3

The installation of Business Objects XI R3 seems pretty straight forward. Double click the setup file.. next next next.. but.

After the installation, when I tried to surf to any of the pages on my Tomcat server, I got Error 404 application not found.

After a bit of surfing, I found an entry on a forum.

It was a discussion between two people that entirely pictured my problem.. what follows is a howto based on their conversation.

When trying to surf to http://servername:8080/CmcApp, I got an error 404 saying CmcApp not found.

1) go to

C:\Program Files\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0\java\applications

and check if the WAR files are there -- if not -- reinstall

2) go to C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Tomcat55\conf and change the tomcat-users.xml file to contain a user (currently logged user f.i.) with rights

like such :

<user username="username" password="yourpassword" roles="admin,manager"/>

don't forget to restart the tomcat server (service)

3) surf to http://servername:port/manager/html (Tomcat Manager) and login with the username and password you just created

4) add all of the war-file (bottom of the page) from the directory you found in step 1.

5) try starting the CMC again

(this worked for me)