Applying Preferences and Best Practices for Performance 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 story 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 preferences 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.

In addition to creating visibly appealing as well as meaningful stories, following basic standards can also help improve the performance of your stories, from how quickly the widgets render on a page to how long it takes to scroll through a table.

While there are no specific limits on the number of charts per story or data cells per table, following the KISS principle--Keep It So Simple--is the best guideline to follow.

Here are a few general guidelines to keep in mind as you create stories in SAP Analytics Cloud. Remember, these are guidelines, not rules. There will always be an exception.

• Rather than designing a large story with many pages, try to limit your pages and create different stories for each use-case or audience. If you want to refer to a related story, you can add a hyperlink to a different page, story, or external website.
• Use pages to break up your story by category or type of information. Put your most-viewed content on the first page to make it easily accessible.
• Try to keep the number of individual widgets on each page of your story limited to six or less. Multiple widgets per page are certainly allowed, but an extremely high number of widgets in a page may affect the refresh time for a story.
• Avoid charts with more than 500 data points.
• Load invisible widgets in the background from the Edit area of the toolbar, Refresh → Loading Optimization Settings then choose Background Loading from the drop-down.

• Apply chart filters to reduce the volume of information in charts with more than 1000+ data points and use table filters to keep a manageable amount of information visible in your tables.

• Apply the Top N feature to charts and tables to limit initially the amount of data displayed at one time.

• When adding tables to your story, keep in mind the goal of the table and ensure that viewers can easily navigate the information. To help ensure readability, try to limit your tables to a maximum of 500 rows and 60 columns. If you need to display more, you can edit the drill limitation. Keep in mind that the more cells you include, the harder SAP Analytics Cloud must work to display them.
• If a table is based on planning model but is used strictly for analysis, deselect Planning Enabled in the Builder pane for the table.
• When adding images to your pages, ensure that the images are sized for web and are smaller than 1MB. SVG vectors image files still look great at a small file size. If you cannot use an SVG image file, PNG image files perform better than JPG.
• When working with blended data, avoid creating linked dimensions on calculated dimensions. Keeping the number of models linked in each story at a minimum will also improve overall speed and performance.
• Limit the number of data-rich widgets on each page like maps or charts with a high volume of data points. Overloading your pages with dense information will make it harder for your viewers to consume and may slow load-time.
• For a Dimension with a large Hierarchy and an ALL node, collapse the hierarchy and/or use the drill capability, even in input controls.
• Be aware of progressive chart rendering, which enables chart widgets to display more quickly when a story is opened a subsequent time (within an hour). This setting is enabled by administrators.
• For Tables with large amounts of data, avoid Styling Rules.
• Enable the "High Performance" power plan (in your computer settings) if scrolling in tables is slow.