Create Your First Story

Stories represent the dashboard and reporting features of SAP Analytics Cloud and provide you with a way to bring data and visualizations together to tell the story of your business.

You can create a story with a template or from scratch. With a template, the theme, branding, layout, and object placeholders are already in the story to help you build your story faster. When building from scratch, you can choose to begin blank with a Responsive page, Canvas page, Grid page, or from a Smart Discovery. Click here to learn more.

We will focus on creating a responsive story page.

1. In Stories from the Main Menu/Navigation bar, click Responsive

2. Select Classic Design Experience, then Create New

The Optimized Design Experience improves performance within SAP Analytics Cloud stories and enables content within an SAP Analytics Cloud story to load faster, but not all features and story options will be available in the Optimized Design Experience features. A new tutorial will be created in the future for Optimized Designed Experience stories.

The first step to creating a story is to import data.

3. Click the Data tab in the top left of your screen

Users may choose to import data from a file, acquire data from a source/connection, or use data acquired from an existing model or dataset.

4. Select Data uploaded from a file, then import the sample dataset found above in prerequisites

5. Make sure to select Use first row as column headers

6. Click Import

By default, importing data directly into a story will embed the data and model into the story. The model will not appear in the folder list for use with other stories unless you explicitly select Convert to Public Dataset in the Data > Grid View. Click here to learn more.

Once your data is successfully imported, you are shown a summary of the imported data and then brought to the wrangling and modeling view, where you can further enhance your data and define your model.

For performance reasons, wrangling and modeling is done only with a subset of the imported dataset. A sample size of 2000 rows is used, and any changes made to the sampled data is applied to the complete dataset during dataset creation.

On the Dataset overview panel on the right, you will see that the measures and dimensions are automatically identified from the imported dataset. SAP Analytics Cloud automatically identifies whether a column is a measure or a dimension. However, it is always good practice to review the data to ensure the measures and dimensions are correctly identified.

In this case, we need to adjust the latitudes and longitudes from measures to dimensions.

To change a measure to a dimension:

7. Hover over the CountryLongitude measure and click on the … menu option

8. Click Change to a Dimension

9. Do the same and change CountryLatitude, CityLongitude, and CityLatitude from measures to dimensions

Now that they are dimensions, we can Geo enrich them. Click here to learn more.

Geo enriching is the process of turning raw coordinate data into identifiable geographies so that SAP Analytics Cloud can visualize the data in a Geo map.

Let’s enrich and turn the Country and City coordinates into location dimensions.

10. Select the CountryLatitude column, then click the Geo Enrich By icon > Coordinates

11. Rename the dimension name to Country_Location

After enriching the Country coordinate, you will see a new column added with both the Country Longitude and Latitude as one dimension.

12. Repeat the same process for the City coordinates and call the Dimension name City_Location

Lastly, let’s enrich our Regions, Countries, and Cities by Area Name.

13. Click on the Geo Enrich By icon > Area Name

14. Select the Geo hierarchy Region > Country > City

Click here to learn more.

Let’s now create a product hierarchy to enable drill-down.

15. In the toolbar, select the Level Based Hierarchy icon

16. In the Hierarchy Builder, select Product Category as the first level, Product Line as the second, and Product Name as the third

17. Click OK

SAP Analytics Cloud then recognizes this hierarchy and allows you to drill up and down between Product Categories, Product Lines, and Product Names within charts. Click here to learn more.

It is best practice to save regularly. Before moving on, click Save.

In the question area below, pick one multiple choice answer and then click Submit Answer.