Choosing Between Optimized and Classic Design Modes

When you create a story, you are prompted to choose Classic Design Experience or Optimized Design Experience mode:

SAP encourages you to use Optimized Design Experience mode. The Optimized Design Experience includes many usability and performance improvements and is the prerequisite for future story enhancements like the integration of analytics design capabilities and digital boardroom features into the story.

Note

There are features that may not be available at this time as SAP continues to enhance the Optimized Design Experience mode; however, these and other new features are being added with each quarterly release and will be made available only in the Optimized Story Experience. Furthermore, it will be the new default experience in future releases.

The benefits of using the Optimized Design Experience include:

• Ghost loading indicators when the system is doing background work
• Navigation of large hierarchies
• Improved tooltip interactions
• More with each quarterly update

The Classic Design Experience will still be available and provide access to features developed prior to Q2 2022. However, it will not receive any performance, functionality, or usability enhancements. There are also elements that will not be available at all in the Optimized Design Experience because there are more suitable substitutes. These elements include:

• Explorer: Replaced by Data Analyzer as the new exploration tool
• Grid Pages: Replaced by the Optimized Presentation table option within Responsive and Canvas Pages
• Old HANA and BW Versions: Always use the latest BW and HANA version to ensure that you have the latest performance and feature functionality in SAP Analytics Cloud.

Note

For the most current information on what features are available with each design experience mode, always refer to the SAP Analytics Cloud Help in your current SAP Analytics Cloud tenant.

If your organization has been using SAP Analytics Cloud prior to 2021, you probably have classically designed stories. Over time, you will want to convert these stories to Optimized design. Currently, there is no conversion tool to convert all stories at one time, but the conversion process is very simple.

In View mode of a story, select Convert to Optimized Design Experience from the File menu. In Edit mode of a story, select Convert to Optimized Design Experience from the Save options. Enable Optimized View Mode only adds optimized enhancement while viewing a story but no design enhancements.

If your story contains any elements that are not yet supported in Optimized Design, you will receive a warning with information about what you must change in your story. You can either make the changes and convert, or delay the conversion until Optimized Design supports the elements. Certain elements are deprecated for Optimized Design, so you must manually substitute that element with the optimized equivalent widget or functionality.

Note

Grid pages will not be supported at all in Optimized Design. You must copy the table on the Grid page to either a new Responsive or Canvas page and delete the Grid page.

The following figure shows an example of the warning message displayed for a specific story.