New data exploration experience in SAP Analytics Cloud

Data exploration is a key task for information workers and business analysts. To better address this critical need we will deliver a new user experience with the Q4 release.
In this blog we show data analysis is now simplified and streamlined in SAP Analytics cloud.

One harmonized exploration experience

Data Analyzer becomes the central point for data exploration in SAP Analytics Cloud. On a long run, our vision is to have SAC Explorer and Search to Insights features integrated in Data Analyzer.

If you are an Information Worker, a Controller or an Analyst you will love the new Data Analyzer module. With Data Analyzer you are able to answer ad-hoc business questions quickly and independently. Consumers can analyze the data for the leadership based on business hypothesis or find insights/trends or get a structured view of the company’s financial performance across different dimensions.

With the Q4 release the Data Analyzer will be accessible through the side navigation bar in SAP Analytics Cloud which include a new starting page.

From this home page Information Workers can easily start a new data exploration from scratch. They can also access to recently used Insights.

Data Analyzer can connect directly to BW BEx queries & HANA Calculation Views without creating an SAC model. Data Anlayzer can also connect to an existing SAC model (Live or acquired model). Data Analyzer allows to do an ad-hoc analysis on a data source and the result of an analysis can be saved as an “Insight”. An Insight consists of a name, a table visualization and a context (data source, navigation state, filter settings, variable values). The visualization as a chart is planned for future release.
Insights can be shared between individuals and teams. Contrarily to Explorer views, Insights are completely independent from stories. They can be accessed directly from the “My Files” folder (File Repository) and they can be opened directly or via URL.

What about my Explorer views?

Many customers have SAC stories where Story Explorer is enabled on one or multiple widgets. Generally, end-users access Explorer, create their own “exploration views” and save them via story bookmarks

As we execute towards our vision of one harmonized exploration experience, we will focus all future investments to Data Analyzer
For that reason Story Explorer is not going to be supported on the optimized view-mode, but continues to be available on the non-optimized view mode in the future. We currently elaborate a way to provide an easy transition from exploration views to Data Analyzer-based Insights.
For the time being it is possible to keep two versions of the same story and share them with the end-users:

• One story version with optimized view mode disabled
• One story version with optimized view mode enabled

This setup lets end-users access their exploration views on the ‘old’ story version even after transition and can support the transition.

What’s next ?

We have in our roadmap few exciting features for Data Analyzer in Q1 2022. The first one is to be able to open the Data Analyzer from a story in table visualizations. The table state will be passed to the Data Analyzer (such as filters, variables, and current drill downs actions) in order to perform a deeper-dive exploration. The first version will be supported in the non-Optimized mode

Insights are saved in the File Repo and just listed as recently used files on the starting page.. In the future a user will be able to publish an insight in the Catalog and add metadata to it. This will facilitate the research of insights through the Catalog by using search and filter capabilities.

In parallel with these new features we also continue to improve access to the live BW connectivity:

• Configure the text presentation (short, medium, long and extra long)
• Enable SAP BW query conditions in table visualization
• Save user variants

For more details regarding these features, please see our official SAC Explorer roadmap here

To help our customers in their transition we work on a smooth way to jump to Data analyzer from the table widget of an explorer view (later also from chart once Data Analyzer supports chart visualization)

So stay stuned!!