Cloud for Analytics – Some early observations – Part 1

So I have been using Cloud for Analytics for a few weeks now and thought that I will share some of my observations here. Those that know me, will know that I will share my honest view here – so I will simply share what I experienced right now in Cloud for Analytics (March 2016).

In the first blogs I have shown how you can take a simple Google Sheet and generate a model out of it, so now I wanted to take a closer look at the visualization options.

So I navigated to the Stories part of Cloud for Analytics and selected the option to “Add Canvas”

and then I selected the option to add a Chart.

Add that point I was asked to select the model, and I am using the model I created previously as shown in the blogs.

After I selected the model, I was able to add a new chart to my canvas and then configure the details as shown below

As you can see above, choose the chart type now does look very similar to SAP Lumira.

In my case I selected a simple Bar Chart and wanted to see how the hierarchical data and different measures from my model would be visualized.

The chart showed all the root nodes from my hierarchy and I was able to drill down and up – which was good to see, but I was looking for an option to actually see the complete hierarchy in my chart or at least the option to choose how many levels of the hierarchy I wanted to see – but was not able to find something close to that.

The other item I noticed – and was not able to find a solution for it on a chart per chart level – is the option to define a scaling factor and a scaling unit. You can see in the image above that my X-Axis scale doesn’t look very pretty anymore, simply because numbers overlap. The numbers overlap because I couldn’t find an option to define a scaling factor – lets say 1.000.000 – and a scaling unit – for example “Mill” – that I could display instead.

I am aware that I can define a scaling in the model, but that is a scaling for any visualization for that particular measure and there might be situations that you want to define a well scaled axis for a particular chart – especially when using measures that have different scaling defined in the model.