6 Tips that can make your SAP Analytics Cloud Experience Delightful

Hello all you SAP Analytics Cloud fans,

At SAP, we’re working hard to provide you with the best experience possible when using SAP Analytics Cloud (formerly known as BOC). We’ve made significant changes to improve the performance and reliability of SAP Analytics Cloud making it more robust than ever.

Starting with Wave 23 (2016.23), the home screen loads 50% faster and stories load 25% faster than before. We have also implemented a wide range of changes outlined below that further improve performance and reliability in general:

1. We have accelerated page rendering by bundling multiple requests into one.
2. Using lazy loading techniques we have improved overall application load-times by delaying the import of libraries until they are actually required.
3. By eliminating synchronous HTTP requests, we have increased the speed of the application by maintaining synchronization with HTTP requests from the browser.
4. We are improving the robustness of data uploading so that 100 eager users can upload 250 MB .csv and 100 MB Excel (.xlsx) files to their SAP Analytics Cloud account at the same time.
5. Data uploads for on-premise data sources are being improved so that users can acquire any amount of data from any on-premise or personal data source (like .xlsx, .csv and Google Sheets) that SAP Analytics Cloud supports as long as they adhere to the thresholds outlined here.
6. With optimized model creation, we have improved the function of creating a model inside a story by allowing users to add descriptions, hierarchies, geo-enrichment, unit labels, and time hierarchies to a private model. Users can also refresh private models by replacing or appending them.

Now that you have heard what we are doing to make SAP Analytics Cloud more powerful, below are 6 things that you can do to make your SAP Analytics Cloud experience more delightful!

6 tips that can make your SAP Analytics Cloud experience delightful

1. Preparing for presentations
   1. For better Digital Boardroom presentation performance, open the Digital Boardroom once prior to the actual presentation. This will cache most of the Digital Boardroom agenda and story content.
   2. Try to avoid unnecessary switching between pages. You can do this by setting the same overview page for an agenda item and the first sub item of that agenda item. If the same page is set then it is not reloaded
2. Story optimization
   1. We know that you can’t get enough of SAP Analytics Cloud’s charts, tables and geo widgets, but try not to overload your story pages with them. The more charts each page has on it the longer it takes to load the page. For example, if you have 36 charts that you want to show in a story, it’s better to have 6 pages with 6 charts on each page than to have 3 pages with 12 charts on each page.
   2. Make sure you don’t have any unused pages in your stories. This can slow down the story loading if you have a slower network connection. While the unused pages will not affect actual client-side processing time, this lowers the size of the actual story content that needs to be downloaded.
3. Chart optimization
   1. Avoid charts with a lot of data points (>500). More data points leads to slower performance. Try using the Top N or Bottom N function. Or aggregate the values at various nodes to reduce the number of data points on a single chart. In addition to improving performance a lesser number of data points will make your charts more readable.
4. Images and pictures optimization
   1. If you are using pictures on your page, use a smaller file size (below 1 MB is good) to prevent long download times. SVG files generally provide the smallest file size and offer the best performance. And PNG files perform better than JPG.
5. Linked Analysis optimization
   1. Make sure that you only add the charts that are essential to a Linked Analysis Set. The more charts that you have in a linked set, the longer it takes to refresh all the charts when selecting a data point.
6. System Resources optimization
   1. We would probably all like to stream 4K videos from our favourite streaming video service, but to do so it is essential to have a fast and stable network to support it. The same goes for SAP Analytics Cloud as well. Make sure network latency is not a bottleneck. For example, to state the obvious, poor Wi-Fi reception equals poor network speed.
   2. SAP Analytics Cloud is a hungry animal. It likes to be fed with lots of CPU and RAM. And although you only need a browser to enjoy all of its capabilities, the browser requires access to a fair amount of your machine’s resources. Ensure that your laptop or desktop system resources are not a bottleneck. For example, a machine with an old CPU or only 2 GBs of RAM may be better for browsing your favorite SAP Wiki about SAP Analytics Cloud, but not actually for using SAP Analytics Cloud!

We hope that you have fun working with your data in SAP Analytics Cloud. Keep watching this blog for more awesome tips and updates from the SSAP Analytics Cloud team.