We live in a data-driven world where every pace is crucial for your business. Talking about data, you might have the fastest computing systems or even invest in data experts, but unless you get the story right, your data won’t make sense. The main goal for storytelling is to reach your audience clearly. This is why storytelling is a must-have skill of the future irrespective of the profession you work for.

Storytelling can become quite cumbersome if you don’t have the right tools. Turn to SAP Analytics Cloud where storytelling is a cinch with features offered right out of the box. Not just charts but SAP Analytics Cloud offers great storytelling features in its table component too. Learn more on table features here.

Chart Scaling

The human brain is believed to have superpowers. It’s all based on a simple fact of what your eyes observe. Yet this magnificent organ also can mislead at times. Optical Illusions. Yes, Illusions create an image that seems normal to the eyes, but they are deceiving in nature. The concept of Chart Scaling is quite simple. Consider a bar chart showcasing a sales KPI, you might tend to lose focus of the numerical label and shy away to the infographics. But the problem arises when there is more than one identical chart with KPIs showcasing different dimensions. Your eyes may trick you seeing the charts making a wrong comparison.

Chart Scaling lets you set constant scale across the story/ application so that the misleading illusion is no more.

Layered plotting

You are in search to project your sales in an effective way but there seems to be a hurdle. A hurdle that is pretty common with storytelling. Visualizing series of infographics (here bars) to convey the need. Turns out, it may not be the most ideal way to represent your data as there is no room to take a deep study. Representing bars side-by-side might be the best way to represent data in a series fashion. However, when your data is limited and has a more-or-less similar number of items, its better to choose a layered bar/ column to deliver the precise story. Approved by IBCS standards, this chart offers plenty of customized info-graph to choose from, suiting your needs.

Smart Grouping

Looking at your sales data, you might want to classify a set of products/ items for example that needs attention and you have no clue how to increase the sales of those products. You probably think that giving away a discount should do the job but oh, wait! You aren’t sure of what products fall under this category. Introduce Smart Grouping! This smart feature in SAP Analytics Cloud lets you do exactly that. Just enable Smart Grouping, sit back and relax. This feature can be applied to scatter/ bubble charts that segregate the data points into groups for easier classification.

The data gets stitched to multiple numbers of groups depending on the nature of the data. These groups can be labelled, and further analysis can be made on the groups too.

Data Point pinning

You are on the way to your vacation and exited to explore the world. To make the most of the time, you make a list of magnificent places to visit and pin them right on your map and off you go! Hakuna-Matata! You might consider including this option on your storytelling skills too. SAP Analytics Cloud allows you to pin your data right away, saving significant time while you perform your slice and dice on the dataset. You only see concise information as a KPI without having to dig any further.

Variance

Setting the trend right doesn’t translate to your sale figures spiking up. Without making a comparison (variance) with past trends you won’t be sure if you are really making profits. Variance adds up the additional context to your data showcasing details without altering your visualization. Glimpse your data for minute changes that matter to you the most using SAP Analytics Cloud variance analysis that provides up-to three variance types catering your data needs.

If you are interested in learning more about SAP Analytics Cloud, check out our series of blogs here.