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.

International Business Communication Standards (IBCS), provides practical guidelines for the standard visualization for business reporting, meaning the consistent design of reports, presentations, dashboards, and the charts and tables they contain.

For example, in a chart, IBCS requires the use of solid bars for actuals, outlined bars for budgets, and hatched for forecasts. This means that every report using IBCS is clearly defined and comparable in different scenarios.

SAP Analytics Cloud is an IBCS-certified software for creating such reports. IBCS templates can be selected for new stories or applied to existing 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 and customizing your Theme Preferences is a great way to specify default formatting options in a story to help conform to your company's branding. You can use the theme preferences to manage theme colors and palettes, edit palettes and apply shared color sets across charts, tables, and widgets to keep your content visually consistent.

Setting theme 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.

You can apply an existing theme to your story, which saves you from configuring preferences; Or you can create a theme either from the existing preferences or from scratch, which can be used across stories.

Save and Apply: Once you've configured and saved preferences for the current story, you will see that your story immediately applies the preferences. Story Settings and Widget Settings apply only to a single story.

Save As: You can save and reuse the theme. After you define formatting for all aspects of theme, then save it. The next time you create a story, you can select the theme from the dropdown menu in the toolbar.

More information on themes can be found in the Configure Preferences and Use Themes section of the SAP Help Portal.