By Iver van de Zand  – Business Intelligence & Analytics – SAP – Visualization – DataViz – Evangelist – Author of “Passionate On Analytics”

Your end users will love it when you’d deliver your story- and dashboards in a more appealing and dynamic way. In these Let Me Guide series I discuss 4 easy to use best practices that will help you doing so:

  1. Using backgrounds

  2. Using Navigation

  3. dynamic Vector Diagram pictures: SVG

  4. Dynamic Text

Using Background

Backgrounds can better the looks and experience of story- and dashboards. Use the opacity to ensure the attention is not too much distracted from the actuals graphs and charts. I tends to create my backgrounds myself using PowerPoint: create a slide with a layout you like allocating space for KPI metrics and visualizations. Save the slide as JPG which you can import as background into SAP Lumira.

Using Navigation 

If you have story- or dashboards with multiple pages, my experience is that custom navigation buttons help you users finding what they should read. I use custom navigation all the time on my storyboard’s landing pages for example. Here is how you do it:

  •  Find a shape or picture that you want to use as clickable button and save it as xx.jpg

  • Import xx.jpg as picture in Lumira and drop it on your storyboard where you want it

  • Drag and drop a rectangle shape exactly over you newly created button and set its lines and fill-color both to “none”

  • Click you “invisible” shape and add the URL or page number to it

  • Save and preview

Example landing page B

example of navigation buttons

Example landing page A

Example landing page A

Example of a core layout of a landing page for your storyboard. The color-coded tiles can be used as navigation buttons. The generic tiles act to show key metrics info. Save the core lay-out as JPG and use this JPG as core background in your storyboard. Now add an object over the color coded sections, make it invisible and add a page-link to the appropriate page in your story.

SVG files

Especially infographics gain on weight and meaningfulness if you use dynamic pictures as part of your charts and graphs. Bar- and line charts in SAP Lumira have the possibility to change its regular column and markers into a dynamic pictogram. You can use the embedded pictograms but also add your own. The pictograms need to be in the SVG dynamic vector format. Search for pictures on Google with the “ filetype:SVG” string to find SVG’s. Save and import them to Lumira and change the graphs properties. The results are impressive. It is easy to create your own SVG files: I use PowerPoint to create my own pictures and save them to JPG. Using conversion tools easily creates an SVG that you can use as dynamic chart/graph picture in your storyboards.

Dynamic Text

Dynamic Text is a powerful way to improve context sensitive messaging in your story- and dashboards. The dynamic text is based on a dataset attributes and thus changes when data is refreshed are filtered. Since SAP Lumira handles the dynamic text as any other attribute, you can also apply formulas against the text.

 www.AmickBrown.com