Usage of mini charts in tables

[Former Member]

I intensively used Web Intelligence capabilities in the past in my product manager role. Web Intelligence is very powerful and offer al lot of possibilities to anyone to want to go beyond the “standard” analytics capabilities.

The objective of this article is to provide some hints and tips using Web Intelligence and especially using input controls.

I created advanced Web Intelligence input controls in the past and after having discussed with my SAP colleagues, I decided to publish several articles on Web Intelligence.

The objective of this document is to show that we can present horizontal bar charts in a table using fonts.

In addition, I created input controls to dynamically change the conditional formatting.

The goal of these input controls is to let a user increase/decrease the thresholds to change the color coding. The user can then dynamically change the report formatting without redesigning it or asking for someone to do it.

To fully take advantage of “mini charts”, the idea is to display the chart in the text field using a specific character.

I created the variable “Position Tag” to display the mini-chart. This variable is used in all formulas and contains only 1 character, is using the normal (subset “Block Elements”) with character code = 2588: █

To display the mini-chart, I created a variable that represent the number of blocks and the numeric value. Here is the generic formula: =LeftPad(""; [My Measure];[Position Tag]) + " " + [My Measure].

Then I created several input controls for different purpose:

• Increment based on a numeric variable used to increase or decrease the measure value
• Maximum threshold
• Minimum threshold

The 2 latter variables are used to change the color coding between green, orange and red.

So the increment can change the value and the color can change accordingly. And as a user I can change the different thresholds.

It’s recommended to have measures figures represented on a 100 base to avoid too large chart. The measure can be computed to have charts fitting in table.

A second report uses the same technique, but the main difference is that the mini-chart displays a ticker on a scale like a track bar. The ticker represents the measure figure position on the scale.

The variable formula used to display the scale and the ticker is: =Substr([Position Filler];1;[My Measure]-1) + [Position Tag] + Substr([Position Filler];[ My Measure]; Length([Position Filler])-[ My Measure])

The variable “Position Filler” has the following definition: ="▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬"

The variable “Position Filler” is using the normal (subset “Geometric Shapes”) with character code = 25AC: ▬

To use special characters, I used Microsoft Word and copied the character in Web Intelligence formula editor.

You can download the document I used to illustrate my purpose.

More articles will come soon.

Stay tuned….