My First Encounter with SAP VI

[former_member199691]

Hello everyone, I came to know about Visual Intelligence through “The Ultimate Data Geek Challenge” and it inspired me to learn about this tool. Here is my first visualization using SAP Visual Intelligence where I tried to explore various features of the tool.

Data Sources: Following data sources can be utilized to create visualizations

I used a sample excel file which was provided as part of installation.

Select the columns that we want to use further in creating visualizations and click on “Acquire”.

Semantic Elements: After acquiring the data, it suggests semantic enrichment (it identifies Measure,Time and Geography columns present in data).

Geographic Hierarchy: This is the feature I like most that we can create a complete geographic hierarchy even if we have City only in the data.

In case of multiple matches, we can select the right one.

It will create new columns for Sub-Region, Region and Country which we can later user in visualizations.

Manipulation Tools and Formula: Once the data is acquired, we can use given formulas or/and Manipulation tools for data cleansing or write some logic.

Quick Tabs: Let us quickly talk about tabs available just below the menu bar.

Data/Split/Visualize is to define the work area. Data will display only data, Visualize will display only visualizations and in Split mode, work area will be split in two sections, one each for Data and Visualization.

Grid will display the data in tabular format. Facet is another feature I liked a lot – it gives the sum of individual Measures against individual attributes (and we also get the count of lines per attributes).

Add Calculation:
We can create measures for visualization using predefined calculations e.g. Running Sum, Percentage etc.

Visualizations: Here are some sample visualizations created using Visual Intelligence in seconds.

Sharing: Now we are done with data acquisition, manipulation and visualization and would like to share this with colleagues. For that, we have following options to share visualization:

• Publish to StreamWork
• Send Visualization by mail  

For sharing data:

• Export as File
• Publish Dataset to Hana
• Publish to StreamWork
• Publish Dataset to Explorer

I believe this is a very good visualization tool for an end/business user which can be used without knowledge of any technology (that means no need to be dependent on IT to answer your questions) and will be very handy in analyzing data to make decisions quicker.