What Is a story?
Stories are at the center of the SAP Analytics Cloud experience. They are presentation-style documents that use charts, visualizations, text, images, and shapes to describe data. A story is where you explore data interactively to find insights, visualize information with charts and tables, and share, present, and comment on your findings with colleagues.
Classic design vs optimized design
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 whenever possible. The Optimized Design Experience includes many usability and performance improvements and is the prerequisite for future story enhancements like the integration of application design capabilities and digital boardroom features into the story. There are a set of 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 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 Classic Design Experience 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.
NoteIn Classic Design Mode, stories have two main views.
How to start a story
Watch this video to learn how to start a story.
Guidelines for data visualization
There is no right or wrong way to tell a story; that is entirely up to you.
The figure Visualizations lists some options for data visualizations.
There are, however, general design principles that can help you create meaningful, attractive stories that provide useful information.
Follow some simple guidelines to create your own visualizations.
Story pages
When creating SAP Analytics Cloud stories, you have different page types to choose from:
- Responsive - required for viewing on mobile devices; dynamically changes layout depending on the viewer's monitor/screen size.
- Canvas - a fixed page size that does not change, no matter the size of the viewer's monitor size.
- Grid - a table-only page that is available only in the Classic Design Experience and will not be available in the Optimized Design Experience.
or Table 
. Or, you may need to select the . . . More option in the menu bar and select from there.
Builder pane. Once you are in the Builder pane, you simply add the appropriate data to the various elements of the widget.
Styling pane, which provides many formatting options for every component of the story, including the page itself.
