Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud – March 2023, Key Insights from The Spring Update

The second Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud (OAC) release of the year is here (after the Janu­ary update), and in this blog post we’ll bring you up to date with some of the new fea­tures that we’ve tested.

1. Con­di­tional Format­ting and Rule Blending

Con­di­tional format­ting was intro­duced in the July ‘21 release and synvert covered this fea­ture in our OAS 6.4 blog post last year. Con­di­tional format­ting allows us to add dif­fer­ent rules to our data visu­al­isa­tions in order to cus­tom­ise data or val­ues in a dif­fer­ent format, based on cer­tain con­di­tions (for example, Rev­enue > 10,000 USD).

But in this release, Oracle has added an enhance­ment to con­di­tional format­ting – the abil­ity to blend rule styles: for example, allow­ing one rule to col­our a cell, and another rule to make the font bold. Let’s look at some more examples and how to do it.

From the work­book, in the Visu­al­ize mode we go to the Menu icon (3 dots at the top right in the visu­al­isa­tion)  and choose the option Con­di­tional Format­ting | Man­age Rules.

The Con­di­tional Format­ting tab will appear, where we can define mul­tiple rules for format­ting within the visu­al­isa­tion. This improve­ment enables us to visu­al­ise data in dif­fer­ent ways by adding more format­ting, and gives us the abil­ity to cre­ate more than one rule and then select the one that suits our dash­board present­a­tion the best.

Now let’s imple­ment this in a new example: ima­gine that we want to visu­al­ise rev­en­ues greater than or equal to 1,000 with the cell filled in green, and rev­en­ues between 500 and 1,000 filled in orange. This was, of course, already pos­sible, but now we can add one more fea­ture to blend the rules: we’ll put the orange meas­ures in bold and ital­ics as well, to make them stand out more because they need improvement.

To define the last char­ac­ter­ist­ics, we select the + icon and the Format tab will appear, where we just have to select the cus­tom­isa­tion that best suits our visualisation.

Once the rules have been defined, click on Save and give it a mean­ing­ful name:

At this point it’s time to apply the con­di­tion format­ting to our dash­board and see the res­ult: simply right-click on the visu­al­isa­tion, select Con­di­tion Format­ting, and we’ll see the ‘Total Rev­enue’ rule that we saved in the pre­vi­ous step:

2. Para­met­ers

This update has also added a key tool for advanced users that are already accus­tomed to using Clas­sic Ana­lyses and Dash­boards  in OAC, namely the abil­ity to cre­ate and employ fixed para­met­ers almost anywhere.

But what exactly is a para­meter? In OAC a para­meter is a reusable, user-defined, loc­ally avail­able meas­ure or attrib­ute that is based on a set of rules that we can con­fig­ure for use in our work­book. As we can see in the screen­shot below, they can be defined in the Para­met­ers tab in a vari­ety of ways, our favour­ite being a Logical SQL Query which gives plenty of room for creativity.

These para­met­ers can be used in a vari­ety of ways, and here we’ll look at those that have recently been added. The first example of para­meter usage is when we’re gen­er­at­ing a cal­cu­lated field and can do the following:

In this example, we have cre­ated a new sales meas­ure that will be filtered based on the date spe­cified in the parameter.

Once the meas­ure has been con­figured as a cal­cu­lated field, we can use the para­meter fil­ter expres­sion on our visu­al­isa­tion, offer­ing us new ways to dis­play data in OAC, as seen below:

Now let’s run through para­met­ers on data actions, which we can con­fig­ure in the fol­low­ing menu:

The two most com­mon uses of data actions are ana­lyt­ics links and URL nav­ig­a­tion. Now we can use para­met­ers on them, open­ing up a whole world of pos­sib­il­it­ies. Once gen­er­ated, we can use them on our dashboards:

Para­meter use in visu­al­isa­tions is a very power­ful fea­ture, often used in Clas­sic Ana­lyses and Dash­boards, so it’s bound to be wel­comed by all advanced users!

3. Show or Hide the Fil­ter Bar on Dashboards

Oracle has always allowed us to apply the fil­ters we need to a dash­board page, or to apply them dir­ectly to a visu­al­isa­tion  dur­ing its cre­ation, but the fil­ters were always vis­ible in the Present Panel.

Now, with this new release, we can hide those fil­ters so our final visu­al­isa­tion looks even better!

To imple­ment this new fea­ture, let’s open a work­book that con­tains a fil­ter visu­al­isa­tion. In the fol­low­ing image, there is a fil­ter at the top of the dash­board page and another for the ‘Total Rev­enue by year Quarter 1, Sales’ dash­board.

Nav­ig­ate to the Present mode and add the can­vas to the story, where we can see both the fil­ters in the present­a­tion. If we look in the Present mode we’ll see that there are two new tabs along with the canvases which were miss­ing from the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of OAC (Work­book & Act­ive Canvas).

Click on the Act­ive Can­vas tab and we can see a list of con­tents con­tain­ing all the inform­a­tion embed­ded in that can­vas (for example, page title, types of visu­al­isa­tion, fil­ter bar, etc.). From the Fil­ter Bar sec­tion, select or deselect the con­tents to show or hide a fil­ter bar in the dashboard:

Con­clu­sion

Oracle has released the second update of 2023 with sev­eral new fea­tures, enhance­ments, and fixes that improve the over­all OAC user experience.

Take a look at the new fea­tures and start using them to get a bet­ter present­a­tion of your dash­boards by apply­ing the neces­sary format changes to your data, and get more space for your visu­al­isa­tions by hid­ing the fil­ter bar.

We haven’t covered all the new fea­tures here, but we shouldn’t for­get the time fil­ter for deliv­er­ies (quickly see your most recent deliv­er­ies and get an idea of deliv­ery evol­u­tion over the past week), nor how easy it is to sign a PDF report by just choos­ing the digital sig­na­ture registered at the Pub­lisher instance. We can see that OAC is going in the right dir­ec­tion, updat­ing fea­tures that help users to get the job done stylishly.

In the mean­time, if you want to see how Oracle can bring even more value to your busi­ness, just get in touch with our cer­ti­fied, exper­i­enced consultants!