Applying Preferences in a Story

Communication standards are rules that specify how communications should be designed. They help us navigate daily life all the time. Consider, for example, traffic signals. Can you imagine the chaos if traffic signals looked different in every city or country? In a case like this, standardization is literally a life saver.

But what about business reporting and analytics? Imagine different teams creating reports with different designs. Without standardized notation and formatting, the consumers may interpret these reports differently. The time spent preparing and deciphering the charts is better spent on using the information to inform decisions.

Some general guidelines to follow when creating stories for your entire organization include:

• Have a clear message.
• Identify content with a well-defined title concept.
• Use corporate branding colors, fonts, etc.

The two images, Before Story (top) and After Story (bottom) show the difference between a poorly designed and a well-designed story.

The Before story is very "busy," which makes it difficult to know what to focus on. It also does not explain what the numbers mean and why a viewer should care about them.

However, the After story highlights the most important information in a single number (January's New Customers) and presents the information clearly and concisely.

With features like easy-to-build templates, Styles, and flexible formatting, SAP Analytics Cloud makes it simple to incorporate formatting standards into your stories.

For more information regarding story design, see the following :

• Canvas vs Responsive Layouts in SAP Analytics Cloud
• Part 1: How to Create Dynamic Images in SAP Analytics Cloud Story

Setting Preferences is a great way to specify default formatting options in a story to help conform to formatting standards. Setting preferences for the story allows you to define formatting for various story elements once, rather than defining them for each story element on each page of your story.

Story Settings and Widget Settings apply only to a single story, but remember that you can save a story as a template. You can efficiently define formatting for all aspects of a single story, save that story as a template, and use that template for future stories. In this way, you set formatting preferences one time in one place, rather than making the same formatting changes over and over.