Introduction
The topic of visualization is becoming increasingly important for a fast and safe communication of information. Simple but meaningful representations of information support decision makers in the finding correlations, patterns or outliers. Good information design gives you a fast and effective overview of your business.
The International Business Communication Standards (IBCS) are a set of rules by Rolf Hichert that serves as a guideline how to use meaningful visualizations in business reporting correctly. In addition to our graphomate charts and graphomate bullet graphs we provide the graphomate tables, a further component for SAP Lumira Designer which is also based on the IBCS rules for displaying informative tables.
Charts, as they are realizable with our graphomate charts extension, can be interpreted quickly and efficiently by our eye-brain vision system. They do not have to be "read" like tables. But tables have the big advantage that they represent lots of information in very limited space. They are perfectly suited for presentation of detailed data and therefore are very important in the usage of BI systems.
Dashboards and BI applications should follow the visualization mantra of Ben Shneiderman: "overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand"!
Charts provide a quick overview, whereas tables show detailed data from the end of the navigation path of a dashboard application. Our table component focuses on easy to read information design according the rules of HICHERT®IBCS.
Multiple dimensions in rows of the Initial View are represented as (implicit) hierarchy. If an (external) BW hierarchy is used on a dimension, only this one dimension can be used with the graphomate tables. Please use measures and no further dimensions in columns and only select complete columns for each data series. Furthermore make sure that all cells to be displayed are delivered by the underlying Data Source: e.g. all hierarchy levels must be visible – otherwise the graphomate tables show wrong results.
The graphomate tables are not an analytic component. We highly recommend not to display more than 1000 cells with graphomate tables.
For multidimensional analyses please use the Lumira Designer Crosstab standard component.
For our graphomate tables extension Lumira Designer >= 2.0 SP03 and IE 11+ are required. For further information, for example about the deployment on the Business Intelligence Platform (BIP) or SAP Netweaver, please consult the Product Availability Matrix.
Please note that we will no longer support Internet Explorer 9 and 10 from 2017.