High­lights from the Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud March 2024 Release

Wel­come back to our Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud (OAC) blog series for another jour­ney through the realm of data empower­ment and innov­a­tion. We are thrilled to share the new enhance­ments and updates from the March 2024 release of OAC with you, fea­tures that prom­ise to improve the Oracle data land­scape even more. Let’s dive in!

1. Set Loc­ale and Lan­guage Pref­er­ences in Your User Profile

One of the new fea­tures intro­duced in the OAC March 2024 update is the abil­ity to set your loc­ale and lan­guage pref­er­ences dir­ectly from your user pro­file, mak­ing OAC easier to use than ever before for both developers and report con­sumers, giv­ing you full con­trol and a clear under­stand­ing of all Ana­lyt­ics Cloud func­tions. Let’s take a closer look at how to con­fig­ure this feature:

Lan­guage pref­er­ences are in the User Pro­file set­tings menu. Click on the User icon in the top right of the main page, then choose Pro­file in the pop-up menu:

In the sub­sequent pop-up menu, you’ll be able to see the Lan­guage and Loc­ale settings:

By default, both are set to Auto, mean­ing that OAC uses your . Now, with this new fea­ture, you can over­ride the browser set­tings to ensure that the OAC inter­face is dis­played in the lan­guage of your choice:

• After select­ing the lan­guage and sav­ing, a warn­ing mes­sage will appear, indic­at­ing that your changes will be applied after your next login to Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud:

This fea­ture is more than a simple trans­la­tion: when choos­ing a lan­guage that has dif­fer­ent read­ing rules (for example Arabic, which is read from right to left), the entire plat­form inter­face is adjus­ted accord­ing to these rules, as you can see below in the Sales graph:

2. Dis­play Neg­at­ive Num­bers in Red

In our blog post on the Janu­ary update, we dis­cussed the intro­duc­tion of a new fea­ture that allows for the format­ting of neg­at­ive val­ues on the X‑axis, and the abil­ity to is a sig­ni­fic­ant improve­ment to this fea­ture in the latest release. This enhance­ment provides the users with imme­di­ate visual indic­at­ors, identi­fy­ing areas of con­cern or those devi­at­ing from anti­cip­ated val­ues. So, whether you’re deal­ing with per­form­ance met­rics, fin­an­cial data or any other type of data, you can eas­ily find neg­at­ive val­ues that are cru­cial for your ana­lysis. Format­ting takes just a few clicks:

• In Edit mode, go to the Prop­er­ties panel of your visualisation:

• Then open the Val­ues settings:

• In the Set­tings panel you’ll see the option to cus­tom­ise the appear­ance of neg­at­ive values:

• After click­ing on it, the pop-up win­dow will dis­play the options for neg­at­ive num­bers, two of which are in red:

• Select one of them and the change is imme­di­ately applied to the visualisation:

Using the steps described above, you can high­light neg­at­ive num­bers not only in visu­al­isa­tions, but also in tables and pivot tables:

3. Bind Para­met­ers to Rel­at­ive Time Filters

Recent updates intro­duced a fea­ture known as Para­meter Bind­ing, high­lighted in our blog posts about the July 2023 and Novem­ber 2023 updates. With the latest release, this func­tion­al­ity is fur­ther enhanced, namely by its applic­a­tion to rel­at­ive time fil­ters. To lever­age this fea­ture, you first need to cre­ate a rel­at­ive time fil­ter. Then you’ll notice a new icon next to each value, enabling you to cre­ate a new para­meter for these val­ues or to choose an exist­ing one:

All the cre­ated para­met­ers can be found in the left pane in the Para­met­ers tab. From here, you can drag and drop them into the desired visu­al­isa­tion, provid­ing a more intu­it­ive and user-friendly experience:

You can modify these para­met­ers, restrict­ing the range of select­able options within the fil­ter to only those that are genu­inely neces­sary. For instance, you could dis­able the cap­ab­il­ity to fil­ter by days or exclude val­ues greater than 12:

Besides rel­at­ive time fil­ters, this update also enables the bind­ing of para­met­ers to Top/Bottom N fil­ters and ref­er­ence lines.

4. Add Emo­jis and Icons to More Visu­al­isa­tion Types

As we’ve already seen, sig­ni­fic­ant enhance­ments have been intro­duced in this update, espe­cially in the area of emoticons and icons. Expand­ing upon the pre­vi­ous updates, which lim­ited their use to tables, the latest enhance­ment broadens their applic­ab­il­ity across a wide range of visu­al­isa­tions. To use these emo­jis, you’ll need con­di­tional format­ting — a well-estab­lished fea­ture that has been extens­ively dis­cussed in vari­ous blog posts by our con­sult­ants:  Con­di­tional Format­ting and Rule Blend­ing and Con­di­tional Format­ting.

Emoticons and icons demon­strably improve the visual appeal and com­pre­hens­ib­il­ity of rep­res­en­ted data, as well as con­trib­ut­ing to the over­all user exper­i­ence. Here’s a prac­tical example of how to apply these enhance­ments effectively:

We have chosen a Tile visu­al­isa­tion to explain this fea­ture. Our focus is on profit, set­ting con­di­tions to apply icons through con­di­tional format­ting: one icon if the profit exceeds $300k and another if it falls below this threshold. In the con­di­tional format­ting set­tings, we select icons cor­res­pond­ing to these con­di­tions. The image below shows how icons can be effect­ively used with con­di­tional format­ting in a Tile visualisation:

The con­di­tion has been set as follows:

Next, let’s check how emoticons, icons and col­ours can be selec­ted, as illus­trated in the image below:

5. Dis­play Ref­er­ence Lines in Attrib­ute Columns

In our pre­vi­ous blog post on the Oracle Janu­ary 2024 Release, we high­lighted the sig­ni­fic­ant bene­fits of ref­er­ence lines for emphas­ising crit­ical inform­a­tion. Until recently, their use was con­fined to time-based cat­egory columns, but the latest release extends this func­tion­al­ity to all column types, which is par­tic­u­larly use­ful when deal­ing with a wide array of column clas­si­fic­a­tions. For instance, incor­por­at­ing a ref­er­ence line within the ‘Mode of Ship­ment’ column (Y‑axis) greatly facil­it­ates the iden­ti­fic­a­tion of spe­cific ship­ping modes within the visu­al­isa­tion, provid­ing an imme­di­ate, clearer under­stand­ing of the data on display:

This approach enriches the user exper­i­ence by offer­ing a more intu­it­ive under­stand­ing of the data. What’s more, with the enhance­ments intro­duced in the latest updates, you can now select either a sin­gu­lar ref­er­ence line or a band for each line, as we can see below:

To add ref­er­ence lines, you just need to hover over the visu­al­isa­tion and right-click. Vari­ous options will appear, and we need to select Add Stat­ist­ics and Ref­er­ence Lines.

Another note­worthy update we’d like to high­light is the improve­ment in cre­at­ing ref­er­ence lines, par­tic­u­larly aimed at emphas­ising the Row Count. With this update, we now have access to an expan­ded selec­tion of func­tions to choose from:

In the Prop­er­ties panel, an option called Func­tion has been intro­duced, offer­ing a range of choices includ­ing the Top N and Bot­tom N options. These options allow you to set a ref­er­ence line for the top or bot­tom N cat­egor­ies within the data­set; the Value option is used to spe­cify the exact value of N. In our demon­stra­tion, select­ing a value of 3 has high­lighted the second class ship mode as the third cat­egory with the few­est records:

6. Per­sist Auto Insights Column Selec­tion and Insight Types

One of the latest advance­ments in Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud is in the Auto Insights fea­ture, spe­cific­ally the per­sist­ence of column selec­tions and insight types. This ensures that user set­tings are retained across ses­sions, facil­it­at­ing an unin­ter­rup­ted work­flow even after work­books have been closed and reopened. Pre­vi­ously, Auto Insights would reset user-defined options to default set­tings upon clos­ing a work­book, mean­ing recon­fig­ur­a­tion, but now, on return­ing to a work­book, users will find their pre­vi­ous selec­tions and insight types pre­served, stream­lin­ing the ana­lysis pro­cess by elim­in­at­ing the need for repet­it­ive setups. This improve­ment saves time, allow­ing for more in-depth and pro­duct­ive data analysis.

Nev­er­the­less, for those occa­sions when you want to start afresh to uncover new insights or to approach the data from a dif­fer­ent per­spect­ive, reset­ting para­met­ers to default set­tings remains an option, and this can be done by simply click­ing on the Reset to default set­ting button:

Con­clu­sions

Now that we’ve fin­ished our review of the March 2024 enhance­ments to Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, it’s clear that even minor updates can sig­ni­fic­antly enhance user exper­i­ence and pro­ductiv­ity. Fea­tures such as the per­sist­ence of Auto Insights and the abil­ity to eas­ily reset to default set­tings demon­strate Oracle‘s com­mit­ment to provid­ing users with intu­it­ive data ana­lysis tools, and whilst this update may not bring a mul­ti­tude of new fea­tures, the advances presen­ted in this blog post show their con­tinu­ous effort to stream­line work­flows. Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, with these and future updates, still leads the way in set­ting bench­marks for mod­ern data ana­lyt­ics plat­forms. Stay tuned for our next post, and don’t wait a moment longer to get in touch with our team of cer­ti­fied experts for solu­tions tailored to your spe­cific needs!