Using Explorer and Smart Insights

SAP Analytics Cloud provides powerful tools to let you explore and gain insights into your data. These tools are used in both stories and analytic applications with some minor differences in usage. Only the usage specific to the analytics designer is described here.

Explorer

When you run an analytic application, you can launch the Explorer for a chart or table to select different dimensions and measures, experiment with filters, and more.

Note

Before running an application and initiating the explorer, you need to enable the explorer for the charts or tables in the Builder tab of the Designer panel as you do for an ordinary story.

There are two ways to launch the explorer:

  • Save the application and choose Run Analytic Application. Just as you do in a story, select the chart, and then select (Explore).

  • Leverage the script API to launch the explorer mode in the application to generate charts or tables for data exploring. The script API can set additional dimensions and measures to the current data source in explorer mode and trigger launching of explorer. For example:

    Sample Code
    //Add Travel_Date and Traveler dimensions to current dimension scope for data exploration.
Chart_1.getDataSource().getDataExplorer().setAdditionalDimensions([“Travel_Date”, “Traveler”]);

    For more detailed information about the APIs, refer to Analytics Designer API Reference in the SAP Help Portal.

In the Explorer, you see a faceted view of your data, which you can manipulate to generate charts for preview. To be able to save a chart to a new story directly from the Explorer, select the option Create Story from Widget in the section Quick Menus of the chart widget's Styling panel when you design the analytic application. You'll then be able to select the icon in the Explorer's visualization area and choose Create a New Story.

Smart Insights

Smart insights automatically discovers key insights, including correlations, exceptions, clusters, links, and predictions of data, and brings you straight to the results instead of requiring time-consuming manual data exploration.

In an analytic application, smart insights is only available if Explorer is enabled.

You also need to make sure you have selected Smart Insights in the Quick Menu section of the Styling panel of the corresponding chart or table widgets.

There are two places you can trigger smart insights for a chart or a table:

  • After you run the analytic application, trigger smart insights by selecting a data point in a chart or right clicking a data cell in a table.

  • After you run the analytic application and enter the Explorer mode of a certain data point, go to the visualization area and trigger smart insights by selecting a certain data point in the chart or right clicking a data cell in a table.

Note

You cannot trigger smart insights for charts and tables in a popup.

Furthermore, you can continue to run smart insights with generated data in the smart insights panel or create a story based on the visualization generated in smart insights if you've enabled creating story for the chart or table widget when designing the application. To do this, in the Quick Menus section of the chart or table widget's Styling panel, select the option Create Story from Widget.