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dc_chuang
Explorer
In Web Intelligence, there is no direct functionality to display a tooltip when hovering over a image (cell) in a report. This may be something needed to meet the 508 Compliance standards, where images must be recognizable to a screen reader to convert to speech for the visually impaired. In order for this to work, there needs to be some sort of text displayed, such as a tooltip.

If you're researching this topic, you've likely come across KBA1256925 which demonstrate how to display different values for tooltip when hovering over column. This is a start, however there are a number of drawbacks when doing this with a cell containing a background image, such as having the html content appear over the image and having it export properly to Excel. The former can be addressed by setting the html content to be transparent, but Excel will still export the html content instead of the image (note this does not happen with PDF export).

I've found it possible to get a tooltip to appear that works for both viewing and exporting, by reading the cell content as a Hyperlink and coding the formula in a way that the Excel export does not see. This may be a nuance in how the program works (I'm using BI 4.2 SP2), as the Excel export cannot read a http referenced img src.

There are a couple additional steps involved with creating a duplicate image cell, (which functions as the tooltip) and a blank image (for the img src). The result will be two images, one on top of the other, with the original image exportable to Excel, while the duplicate image functions as the tooltip and is ignored by the Excel export.

As preparation, there needs to be a blank, transparent image on your server for the report to access. I will not go into the details of creating the image, since this can be found elsewhere. If you need something for testing, the blank.gif I used is in the empty space below. I copied this file to C:\Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\tomcat\webapps\clientapi in my setup.



After you have the blank image on your server, the following steps will create the tooltip overlay:

1. Right click on the image cell and click Copy



2. Right click on an empty area of the report and click Paste



3. Right click on the new cell and click Format Cell…



4. In the Format Cell > General section, under the Display area, change the “Read content as” dropdown to Hyperlink


5. In the Format Cell menu (left side), click Layout



6. Under Position change the Left edge of the cell to be 0 inches to the Left side of... the original image cell and change the Top edge of the cell to be 0 inches to the Top side of... the original image cell



7. Click OK to save

8. Right click on the new cell and click Edit Formula...



9. Paste the following into the Formula with your specific tooltip text (title) and your img src location.

<a href="=" title="SAP Logo"+"\" nav="web"onclick="return false" style=\"text-decoration:none!important\"><img src="http://localhost:8080/clientapi/blank.gif"/></a>



9. Click the green check button to validate the formula then click OK, click OK



Now when you place your cursor over the image, a tooltip appears.



When the report is exported to Excel, the logo appears properly.



So this is it in a nutshell. I thought this was interesting in how the program can be tweaked to work, hopefully you got something useful out of this.