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Author's profile photo Fabien AUBERT

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!!

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      11 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Ameya Gupte
      Ameya Gupte

      Nice and informative. Thanks for sharing

      Author's profile photo Vibhav Nallan
      Vibhav Nallan

      Thank you for this article, very informative.

      Is there any information on when this feature will be available with a Data Warehouse Cloud live connection?

      Author's profile photo Fabien AUBERT
      Fabien AUBERT
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Nallan,

      DWC support is plan for Q4 2022.

      https://roadmaps.sap.com/board?PRODUCT=67838200100800006884&range=CURRENT-LAST&BC=000D3AAC9DD21EEB9DBC0198E4843131&BC=6EAE8B27FCC11ED892E91CE972E900CC#Q4%202021;INNO=000D3ABE796A1EEC879151B8998050EB

      Best Regards

      Fabien

      Author's profile photo Markus Wagner
      Markus Wagner

      Hi,

      our actual release is as follows:

      2021.14.16 (Client)
      2021.14.15 (Server)
      1)
      I can not find the Data Analyzer in the side-menu.
      -> It should be already released?

      2)
      While testing the SAC mobile app, i find out, that the data analyzer is not mobile-ready - are there plans to release it aso for mobile?
      if not, which generic options do we have to use this functionality on our mobile devices?

       

      Berst regards

      Markus

      Author's profile photo Henry Banks
      Henry Banks

      Hi Markus Wagner

      the Data Analyzer on the side-menu is planned for release in the Q4 2021 update (e.t.a weekend of 13th November) - that would be shown as Wave 2021.20 - currently, your environment is still in the Q3 version.

      i tried searching for Analyzer in the roadmap but couldn't find an entry for Mobile at this time https://roadmaps.sap.com/board?PRODUCT=67838200100800006884&range=CURRENT-LAST&q=analyzer#Q4%202021

      Regards, Henry

      Author's profile photo Markus Wagner
      Markus Wagner

      Hi Henry,

      thx for the quick response!

      So i missunterstood the release information, i thought Q4.21 is already released.

      The missing option to use the daraAnalyzer on mobile devices is a hard throwback.
      We have an increasing amount of mobile users (mostly iOS iPads) and we thought, we could easily distribute our BW-Queries with the SAC - a non mobile accessible dataAnalyzer now leads to hundreds of stories/apps with just a table and a bw live query. The analyzer could have saved us a lot of work.

      regads, Markus

      Author's profile photo Raffaele Napoletano
      Raffaele Napoletano

      I think it's  a great idea, but it's not fair remove the support to the Explorer View mode until all the functinoalities are supported by Data Analyzer.

      We were investing time and training to promote this functionality to the business for the Self service Analysis and now we can't just tell that now is not available anymore.

       

      • It's not available in the chart
      • No possibility to restrict dimensions and KPI in the view by default(this means that they need to have knowladge of all the model dimensions and KPI

      This are important limitations, you are just think at expert analytic users, with knowladge of all the model behind, but what about majority of business users? with explorer in few click they can start from a chart and answer some easy question (drill for RU, give me the drivers contributors for LOB etc...)

      The Data Analyzer is too complex for this users, it's basically like create a new story from scratch.

      Hope this can be clarified soon,

      Author's profile photo Andre Paccagnella
      Andre Paccagnella

      Hi all

      In an ad-hoc analysis from an acquired model in SAC, is it possible to change the "Version" of the data being displayed?

       

      Thanks!

       

      Author's profile photo Avi Dear
      Avi Dear

      Add Version dimension to the filter, and then choose which version value to display data.

      Author's profile photo David Gund
      David Gund

      Hello,

      has someone experience with useing the Data Analyzer in the IOS APP? When I what to open the Analyzer via a table in a story I get an error.

      Regards

      David

      Author's profile photo Hugh Gledhill
      Hugh Gledhill

      Hi Fabien AUBERT Henry Banks

      Is there any plan to introduce a currency selection to data analyzer? I want to encourage our user base to start accessing data analyzer for reviewing data they submit in our SAC planning models, but since we are an international organisation working in many currencies, and Data Analyzer is fixed to the single model default currency, it's just not feasible. This is a big concern for us, since we know that Explorer views (our current SAC tool for ad-hoc analysis) are no longer being developed, and will eventually be replaced with Data Analyzer.

      FYI I have raised improvement request 278114 to address this limitation.

      Thanks,

      Hugh