Personal Insights
Empower your year-end reporting with SAP Analytics Cloud
Introduction
Why use data to tell a story?
In his book Energy Management, renowned psychologist Jim Lowe suggests that instead of managing time, it’s better to manage energy. Because people’s energy and attention throughout the day is something more limited than time, this is especially important for bosses who have a lot to do.
Therefore, to make your report impressive, you must make clever use of the expressive power of graphics and data.
In addition, for the year-end report will generally contain three soul questions: Were the goals set last year achieved? Was there outstanding growth this year? What are the plans for the coming year? All can be answered one by one with data.
As shown in Figure 1, we use the sales data of a fictitious company as a case study, and we can see that using data to tell a story can make the audience take in the information better than using words.
figure 1
Use different charts for different business scenarios
We can find many different chart types in the statistical charts of SAP Analytics Cloud Builder, each of which has different advantages.
figure 2
Here, we briefly recommend some charts for year-end reporting.
Line Chart
figure3
Pie Charts
figure 4
Histogram
figure 5
Map
- Use shades of color to show the size of the value of the regional range, such as showing the sales volume of each province and city, the distribution range of the market and other data.
- Using anchor points to show the distribution of data in the region.
Figure 6 combines the above two forms, using gradient anchor points to indicate the size of the value range of each region.

figure 6
What if you don’t have an idea?
SAP Analytics Cloud Smart Discovery supports the automatic creation of your stories after importing data! Just ask a question about the data in the search box and you’ll instantly see visual answers that can be added to the data, and you can change the type of chart as needed! Easy to help year-end reporting ~
Summary
Through the introduction of this issue, I believe your guys must have a little inspiration for your year-end report. Practice makes perfect, so I hope you could kindly apply what you’ve learned to your dashboard design.
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See you in the next issue!
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