Interactive Period Selectors for SAP Design Studio

[IngoH]

As some of you might have noticed, I decided a few weeks ago to leave SAP and join Visual BI Solutions to fully focus on Analytics and data visualization for SAP customers. One of the key focus areas is the upcoming release of our SAP Design Studio Extensions (DSX).

Very Very soon (just a few days away) we will have our first release available and you all will be able to download a trial release and test it out with your own data. I will update everyone with the details.

Today I decided that I will give you a little preview of what you can expect as part of the Design Studio Extensions.

One of the areas in the Add On Suite are the Period Selectors and let me start by showing some screenshots.

 

As you can see in the screenshots above, these are selectors that are very similar to a calendar control, but they are offering much more functionality. First of all these selectors are not just focusing on selecting a date, but instead you can select the month, the year, the quarter, and in case of the Multi Select option you can combine several months, quarters, and years.

In addition to those choices you will also be able to define the format that is being returned as value, so that you can then very easily pass the selected period to the underlying data source - for example a BEx query variable that requires an input of YYYYMM - for example 201501 for January 2015.

Another great addition in the Selectors area is the Grid Box.

Now by just looking at the image above you might think that this is just a grid with some text on it, but you will hopefully also notice that there is some alerting happening. The grid box allows you to leverage members of a dimension and offer those for an interactive filter and in addition you can define alerts where you decide - based on the selected measure - which color coding is going to be shown for specific thresholds.

Think about a situation where you are the product manager for an electronics store and that based on the current cost situation your profitability needs your attention. Now instead of going through lots of numbers, the grid box right away highlights the product that requires your attention with a simple alert.

I hope that these small example get people interested in the upcoming release of the Design Studio Extensions (DSX). In case you are interested, you can find out more details here : Visual BI Solutions - Design Studio Extensions - and as I mentioned before, we will offer a free trial for download in the next couple of days.