5 Tips & Tricks for your Business Objects

Hi again, in this short article I’ll go over 5 functions of Business Objects I often used and think are worth spreading the word about. They will highlight the possibilities of WebIntelligence and Analysis for Office

You might know none of them or you might know all of them. Even so it would never hurt to refresh and remember how tools like these are here to help in more ways than you’d think.

Align, Align, Align

We’ll start off with a question. Which company does not like structure? Structure in processes, structure in way of working, but also structure in reporting. With WebIntelligence you can make pixel perfect reports.

Every table, graph or cell in WebIntelligence can be aligned however you’d want it. There’s the standard possibilities, just like in Word you could align left, right, center. But you could also align according to the report edges. Or you could even try aligning relative to other objects in the report. So that, for example, adjusting your image would also move the accompanying text below.

No more dragging and dropping five different cells to make them align. Simply use a relative position towards other objects. Try it out in your next report. You won’t be disappointed.

Automate

Every now and then systems suffers a problem, a glitch or an error. You never know when it’s going to happen, but no software in the world is failsafe. When a system does suffer an issue, it’s important to act quickly and not waste time. That’s why I want you all to try out this next feature: automate the re-scheduling of your reports.

In WebI the scheduled reports are popular, most companies fill the reports up with fresh data every week, day or even hour. Sometimes those loads fail, like I said, it happens to the best. Whenever that happens, this option gives you an easy backup. Just set a rerun time for all your reports, should they ever fail.

This makes sure the report will have run eventually. The frequency and timing are yours to customize. Next time a report fails, it won’t be the users who have to come knocking, the system will have taken care of it by itself.

You will have to go through the BO Admin side (CMC) to have this option available in scheduling.

Repeat members

I’ve been asked where to find this next option in Analysis for Office a lot. That’s why I think it has its place on the list.

In Analysis for Office you can add measures and dimension, but they will only appear once, they don’t repeat for every line, only the top one. Using the option ‘repeat members’, you can show the value of the dimension for every line. Very useful for long lists where you’d have to scroll up and down a lot. You always want to be sure you are looking at the right information, this makes sure of that.

Double the fun

Again an easy one, but not everyone knows it, so it’s on here as well. Using Key and Text values for your objects. There’s a couple of places to switch between these so I’ll use some pictures to illustrate.

Often times descriptions can look alike or be almost identical. You always want to be sure you’re looking at the right info. Keys are never the same, so switching to key values avoids confusion for your users.

Bonus tip: in the side panel you can even choose the option to use different lengths of your text. If you have a short, medium or long text stored, you can call on these as well for your descriptions.

Freeze frame

This last one you can do in both WebIntelligence and Analysis for Office. It’s seldom used, but comes in handy a lot of times. Freezing a specific column in your table to make it stick while scrolling through the rest of your numbers.

You can make a really annoying report really fun to use by freezing one column. It gives the user the ability to scroll the rest of the table and always refer to same column.

So, how many did you know? Do you use any of them already? Great, but if not, give them a try when creating your next report. The business will thank you for it. Thanks for reading and good luck!