In today’s data-centric organizations, visual storytelling is key to unlocking insights. SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) empowers users not only to build standard charts but also to create highly customized visualizations that bring data to life, enabling sharper business decisions.
This article dives into advanced charting techniques within SAC, focusing on how you can customize visualizations to match your unique business requirements and storytelling needs.
While SAP Analytics Cloud offers a rich set of predefined chart types, the ability to tailor charts beyond default settings allows you to:
- Highlight specific trends or anomalies
- Align visuals with corporate branding and design standards
- Enhance user engagement and comprehension
- Build interactive dashboards that adapt to diverse user roles
SAC’s Chart Designer provides granular control over every aspect of your visualizations:
- Change chart types dynamically: Mix and match chart types (combo charts) to compare data series with different scales or types, e.g., combining bar and line charts.
- Add multiple measures and dimensions: Layer several measures or dimensions in the same chart for deeper comparative analysis.
- Custom sorting and grouping: Control the order and grouping of data points to emphasize key insights.
Add visual cues to your charts to instantly signal performance status:
- Color rules: Apply color gradients or thresholds to bars, lines, or points based on measure values (e.g., red for below target, green for above).
- Custom icons: Use shapes or icons as markers to highlight specific data points.
- Dynamic legends: Adjust legends dynamically to reflect the applied conditional formats.
Tooltips and data labels enhance chart clarity by providing context on demand:
- Rich tooltips: Customize tooltip content to include additional measures, dimensions, or even calculated values.
- Label positioning: Adjust the position, font size, and color of data labels for optimal readability.
- Display units: Format numbers with appropriate units (thousands, millions) and decimal precision for better user understanding.
¶ 4. Creating Linked and Interactive Visualizations
SAC supports linking charts within stories to build interactive dashboards:
- Linked analysis: When a user selects a data point in one chart, related charts update automatically to reflect that selection.
- Input controls and filters: Add slicers, dropdowns, or date pickers to let users dynamically filter chart data.
- Drill-down and drill-through: Enable navigation from summary views to detailed data layers or other stories.
Beyond standard charts, SAC offers specialized visualizations suited for specific business contexts:
- Heatmaps: Visualize data density or intensity across two dimensions.
- Scatter plots: Analyze correlations between two measures.
- Waterfall charts: Show incremental changes between data points (ideal for financial statements).
- Bullet charts: Display performance against targets with qualitative ranges.
¶ 6. Embedding Custom CSS and JavaScript (For SAC Extensions)
For organizations requiring unique visual branding or behaviors:
- SAC allows custom widgets using the Analytics Designer tool.
- Developers can embed custom CSS styles or JavaScript logic to create tailored chart components that extend SAC’s native capabilities.
- This approach is ideal for embedding SAC charts into external portals or apps with consistent UI/UX.
- Keep it simple: Avoid clutter by focusing on the key message.
- Be consistent: Use consistent colors, fonts, and scales across charts.
- Test responsiveness: Ensure charts display well on different devices.
- Use interactive features thoughtfully: Don’t overwhelm users with too many filters or drill options.
- Document your customizations: Maintain clear documentation for future updates or team members.
Advanced charting and visualization customization in SAP Analytics Cloud open the door to compelling data stories that resonate across your organization. By leveraging SAC’s flexible chart designer, conditional formatting, interactive linking, and custom widgets, you can build dashboards that are not only informative but also visually engaging and aligned with your business goals.
Mastering these techniques empowers SAP professionals to deliver insights that truly drive business value and accelerate decision-making in complex environments.