Visual BI Extensions - Advanced Conditional Formatting for Charts

[IngoH]

Conditional formatting for Charts is a very important topic and the out of the box charts as part of SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio are only offering some basic functionality in this area and with release 1.6 and the new InfoCharts all your conditional formatting has to come already as an Exception from the assigned data source (BW) - which means you still are missing some advanced options.

If this is an important topic for you - keep reading.

So lets assume we have a data source which shows a dimension Product Group and three measures : Revenue, Cost, and Profit.

So now we are going to setup a chart that shows the Revenue by Product Group.

So our charts does not show all three measures, but we still would like to be able to use any of the measures in the assigned data source to setup a conditional formatting.

So lets look at the options we have available. In the first scenario we can setup a comparison based on a Single Measure.

In that scenario we can choose a "Highlighted Measure" - which can be any of the measures in the data source - and then we can selected a Comparison Measure - which can be any of the measures in the data source.

So for our example we configured the Highlighted Measure to be the Revenue (Net Value) and the Comparison Measure is the Profit. We can then decide if we want to use a static value for comparison or if we want to make it dynamic - which then gives us the option to either setup a Data Cell Selection or we can assign another measure as the Comparison Value (see above).

The second option is to setup a Conditional Formatting based on a Measure Calculation (see above). In such a scenario we can also select a "Highlighted Measure" and we can then setup a calculation as Comparison value.

And last but clearly not least is the option to setup a Conditional Formatting based on a Target Value definition. In our example we are using the Revenue (Net Value) as Highlighted Measure. Our Comparison Measure is the measure Cost and our Target Value is the Revenue (Net Value).

We then defined 2 rules for the highlighting:

- In case the Cost is in 75 to 100% of our Revenue, then the particular item will be Red in the Chart.

- In case the Cost is in the range of 50 to 75% then the item will be orange.

So with those rules our chart looks like shown below.

As shown in the steps here:

• You can setup conditional formatting for charts based on measures that are in the data source but are not necessarily in the chart
• You can setup conditional formatting using a Single Measure, a Calculation, or a Target Value
• You can setup conditional formatting using static values and dynamic values.

In case you interested in such advanced capabilities - feel free to look here for further details:

http://visualbi.com/sap-design-studio/dsx-extensions/

Happy formatting.....