SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards offers three component types to display single values: gauges, progress bars, and value components. A gauge and progress bar shows data on a scale, while the value component only shows a value in numbers. The gauge is the only component of these three types that has the ability to show more than one value. There are a number of different gauge versions available, where the progress bar has only a horizontal and vertical version. All these components are ideally used in combination with Alerts. Alerts will be discussed in Chapter 5, Using Alerts.
This recipe will show you how to set up a gauge. The other two component types work in the same way.
- Add a Gauge component to the canvas.
- Enter
75in spreadsheet cell A1 and bind this cell to the By Range field. - Select By Indicators and rename Indicator 1 to Result.
- Add a second indicator by clicking on the plus button.
- Rename this indicator to Target, enter
90in the Value field, and select Type as Outside Marker:
- Go to the Appearance tab and select the Text sub-tab. Select Show Limits and set size to
8.
As you can see, binding single values works in the same way as binding data series for charts. The gauge component can show more than one indicator and has the option to enter fixed values.
Single-value components can be manually scaled or auto-scaled. There are four options for auto-scaling:
- Value-based: The limits cover a range around the value
- Zero-based: The higher limit is equal to the bound value, while the lower limit is zero
- Zero-centered: The limits cover a range that includes the value and its negative/positive with zero in the middle
- Alert-based: The limits are based on the selected alert method (see Chapter 5, Using Alerts for more on using alerts)