Viewing and Interacting With a Story

An SAP Analytics Cloud story is the primary data reporting and analysis medium. It is often referred to as a report or a dashboard because it can consist of detailed tables, highly visual charts, interactive elements, or a combination of these options.

The following example shows an SAP Analytics Cloud story and the different story pages contained in it: a dashboard of summary information and a more detailed view of the data.

When you open a story, you default to View mode. In this mode, you have very limited functionality and cannot change the story other than with any interactive elements designed in the story. It is similar to read-only in other applications.

In Edit mode, you have full control over the design of the story. You can add elements to the story, including new pages. You can rearrange elements in the story. You can change or add interactivity to the story, and more.

In Present mode, you can create flexible and fluid presentations using the presentation viewer.

Objects used for this retain their interactivity and functionality. They replace static presentations and information with interactive elements based on real data, allowing fact-based decisions to be made.

Present mode allows you to answer questions through direct analysis of current data, planning visually, and simulating the effects of various assumptions and actions.

This topic is covered in more detail in the Using Present Mode to Display Stories lesson in the Designing Stories in SAP Analytics Cloud course.

No separate license is required for the use of Present mode.

In the following video, we will explore a sample story in View mode, highlighting some of the data analysis features available when interacting with a story in this mode. We will also introduce to you to the Present mode.

You can create bookmarks to save different states of a story.

When viewing a story, you may want to come back to the same view of the data every time, or you may want to set up different states or scenarios. For example, you have several pages in your story that have filters or prompts applied to them. You do not want to spend time resetting all of them each time you want to see a different scenario. You would like to open the story, see one scenario, and then quickly switch to another scenario.

• Bookmarks can be either private or global. You can always save a private bookmark, but you need appropriate authorization to save a global bookmark.
• Bookmarks only include filters and prompts.
• Bookmarks can be shared.
• When you create a bookmark, you can choose Customize Link in order to provide a meaningful label at the end of the URL.

In either View or Edit mode of a story, you can export the entire story to either a PDF, PPTX, or Google Slides file type from the File menu.

Note that from the File menu, there is no option to export to CSV or XLSX file types. The export process is strictly a presentation format.

There are options for exporting the story's data in other areas of the story elements, which we will explore in the next section of this lesson.

In many areas of SAP Analytics Cloud, you haveMore Options than can be displayed in the interface.

In some situations, seeing a More Options icon depends on your screen size and resolution as well as your browser's zoom setting. In other words, if you have a large monitor, your browser window may be large enough to display all the possible options you have.

While viewing and editing a story, however, there is a More Actions button available for every element of a story (charts, tables, filtering devices, text, images, and so on). This option provides you with many more design- and object-related options than the story can practically display.

You can think of the More Actions button as being similar to a context or quick menu you access by right-clicking an object.

There will be different More Actions options depending on whether you are in Edit or View mode. When viewing a story, there are fewer options.

In the following example, you can see some of the different options available when choosing More Actions when editing a chart (left) or table (right).

Included in the More Actions button for charts, tables, and other data-dependent story elements is the option to export data to a CSV or XLSX file. Unlike the export option for the entire story, which exports only to PDF, PPTX, or Google Slides files, the Export option exports the data reflected in the object.