How to create a story in SAP Analytics Cloud based on data from MS Excel – and how to update it afterwards

When using MS Excel as a datafoundation, it is not possible to update the excel-sheet and hence update your story – you will have to build a new model, and replace that model in your story.

I will show you how this is done, in a simple and easy way.

First you should build a model, based on your excel-sheet – here is my sales-file on fishing rods for Jan and Feb:

And my model:

I create a story:

I reopen my Excel-sheet and add my sales for March and April:

In the “Data Management” tab in my model, I choose “Import Data From” a “File”

And I choose my updated Excel-sheet.. If all the fields are not mapped, I would have to map them manually by dragging and dropping – but since it is the same Excel-sheet – SAP Analytics Cloud does the manual labour for me – I choose the Import method: Clean and replace selected version data – to ensure that data is being deleted and reloaded – this resembles a full load in SAP BW.

And then I updated my story:

And I get the sales data from March and April in my story.

Conclusion:

By using this easy update functionality, you can actually update your story if it is based on a MS Excel sheet, and you can also blend this data with eg. SAP BW-data, without having to persist this data in SAP BW or other databases.