Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud – High­lights from the Novem­ber 2023 Update

Wel­come back to our Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud blog series! Today we’re excited to embark on a jour­ney through the Novem­ber 2023 release. Just like with our Septem­ber 2023 update blog post, our aim is still the same: to be your guid­ing light as we go through the most sig­ni­fic­ant, game-chan­ging fea­tures that Oracle has in store for us all!

Let’s jump right into this update and unveil the innov­a­tions that Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud (OAC) is ready to deliver.

Nav­ig­ate Canvases using Top Tabs

This new release offers a standout fea­ture: the abil­ity to nav­ig­ate canvases using top tabs. A top tab is a new user inter­face ele­ment found at the top of the work­book, and it allows you to nav­ig­ate between canvases. It offers users another way to cus­tom­ise their work­books and a more user-friendly nav­ig­a­tion exper­i­ence. In com­par­ison with earlier options, this fea­ture now mim­ics tab-switch­ing in most web browsers, so even new users can switch between canvases with ease. Let’s explore how it can be done with the example below:

Now, the Nav­ig­a­tion tab is at the bot­tom of the workbook:

In the Edit mode of your work­book, switch to the Present tab:

Choose the Work­book set­tings in the Set­tings pane on the left:

In the Nav­ig­a­tion pane, select Can­vas Navigation:

Choose Top Tabs from the Style pop-up menu and save the workbook:

Now you can see the Nav­ig­a­tion bar at the top of your workbook:

Spe­cify Work­book and Can­vas Header Tool­bar Options

Oracle Ana­lyt­ics has intro­duced an innov­at­ive fea­ture that allows users to cus­tom­ise the header tool­bar of work­books and canvases, provid­ing greater con­trol and per­son­al­isa­tion options. Con­ven­tional ana­lyt­ics plat­forms often provide a stand­ard header tool­bar that doesn’t always align with the spe­cific needs of indi­vidual users, but now, instead of being lim­ited to a pre­defined set of options, users can add or remove func­tions, thus ensur­ing that their most-used ones are eas­ily access­ible. For example, a fin­an­cial analyst may want quick access to the Export to PDF and Share options in their work­book header tool­bar, to stream­line report shar­ing and distribution.

Let’s look at this fea­ture in more detail by nav­ig­at­ing to the Present tab and delving into the work­book-level tool­bar options, includ­ing export, data refresh, notes, undo and redo, and cus­tom­isa­tion roll­back. The options vis­ible to report con­sumers will be those that users have chosen to enable:

Cre­ate and Man­age Watch­lists as a Con­sumer User

This release offers con­sumer users an innov­at­ive fea­ture – the abil­ity to cre­ate and man­age Watch­lists, a set of visu­al­isa­tions from one or more work­books that can be dis­played on the OAC Home page. With this new cap­ab­il­ity, users can per­son­al­ise their exper­i­ences by cre­at­ing their own col­lec­tions of the visu­al­isa­tions that really mat­ter to them, bene­fit­ing from quick and easy access to the inform­a­tion they need.

Watch­lists are dis­played on your Home page:

You can either add visu­al­isa­tions to an exist­ing Watch­list, or cre­ate a new one while adding a Visu­al­isa­tion card. What’s more, you can add and com­bine them regard­less of whether they are loc­ated in the same work­book or in dif­fer­ent ones.

In the Edit mode of a work­book, hover over the visu­al­isa­tion you want to add and click on Add to Watch­list:

From the pop-up menu choose either New Watch­list or an exist­ing one:

You can change the view of the visu­al­isa­tion as required from the next pop-up win­dow, then simply click on the Add button:

Now your favour­ite card has been added to the Watchlist!

Format Num­bers with Abbreviations

The next fea­ture we’ll look at is for data rep­res­ent­a­tion, as this release enables you to format large num­bers on your report with abbre­vi­ations. You can select the abbre­vi­ation not only for num­bers but also for cur­rency: thou­sands (K), mil­lions (M), bil­lions (B), or tril­lions (T).

To do so, open your work­book in Edit mode and click on the visu­al­isa­tion where you wish to apply the formatting:

From the Prop­er­ties pane, move left to Values:

At the bot­tom, you can see that the Abbre­vi­ate option is set to Off. In the pre­vi­ous ver­sions of OAC it was pos­sible to turn this on and the num­bers would be adjus­ted auto­mat­ic­ally. Now, by click­ing on it, vari­ous options are dis­played, such as K, M, B, and T, and you can choose the one that best suits your needs:

With this mod­est fea­ture, OAC makes data clearer and more accessible.

Bind Para­met­ers to Filters

We covered the Para­meter Bind­ing fea­ture in our recent blog post (Unveil­ing the July 2023 OAC Release). This long­stand­ing fea­ture in Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud has seen sig­ni­fic­ant improve­ments and new addi­tions, provid­ing users with an enriched and more ver­sat­ile set of tools.

At its core, this fea­ture empowers OAC users to cre­ate dynamic and inter­act­ive data fil­ter­ing exper­i­ences in their reports and dash­boards. It allows you to con­nect para­met­ers to fil­ters and enables a more respons­ive and per­son­al­ised approach to data ana­lysis. Dash­boards and reports can become more inter­act­ive than ever, as users can change fil­ter para­met­ers on the fly, explor­ing data from dif­fer­ent angles and effort­lessly drilling down into spe­cific details.

After nav­ig­at­ing to the report or dash­board where you want to imple­ment this fea­ture, name the para­met­ers that you want to link to your fil­ters. These para­met­ers could be time ranges or min­imum and max­imum numeric values.

In the next example, we will see that users can eas­ily select cus­tom date ranges, provid­ing a more mean­ing­ful view of time-based data. We cre­ated the para­meter From Date, allow­ing users to input their start­ing point by bind­ing this para­meter to the visu­al­isa­tion fil­ter. In this case, after intro­du­cing Order Date as a visu­al­isa­tion fil­ter, we modify the oper­ator from Range to Start At and pro­ceed to para­met­erise this date value with the recently estab­lished From Date parameter:

Users will be able to dynam­ic­ally select any date from the From Date para­meter found on the Fil­ter tab. For instance, if a user inputs Jan 1, 2015, the water­fall chart will dis­play profit num­bers start­ing from that date:

Change the Line style in OAC Visualisations

The next new fea­ture we´ll explore lets us change the style of lines in OAC charts and con­trol line style, thick­ness, and trans­par­ency, enabling the cus­tom­isa­tion of visualisations.

Let’s have a look at how it works with this simple example of a line chart that shows Sales and Quant­ity ordered by Order Date:

To change the style of line, go to the gen­eral Visu­al­isa­tion Prop­er­ties pane on the left:

Under Line prop­er­ties, Oracle has added new para­met­ers that can be changed accord­ing to your preferences:

There are 3 types of line pat­tern (Solid, Dashed, or Dot­ted). In our example, we change it to Dashed:

The prop­er­ties set under the gen­eral tab apply to all the lines in the visu­al­isa­tion. How­ever, if you switch to the Val­ues tab, you will notice that the prop­er­ties are now split for the val­ues dis­played on the chart, offer­ing the oppor­tun­ity to adjust the style for each line separately:

For example, by chan­ging the trans­par­ency of the Quant­ity Ordered meas­ure, you can put the focus more on the Sales meas­ure, and vice versa:

This fea­ture allows us to rep­res­ent dif­fer­ent meas­ures in a more graph­ical and visual man­ner, and it’s avail­able not only on the line chart, but also on all OAC visu­al­isa­tions that sup­port lines.

Con­clu­sion

Oracle Ana­lyt­ics Cloud has unveiled a series of excit­ing new fea­tures designed to improve the way users inter­act with their data. For example, with the intro­duc­tion of Watch­lists, OAC offers users a cus­tom­ised and effi­cient way to access their favour­ite work­book visu­al­isa­tions. Many other power­ful fea­tures, such as cus­tom­ised nav­ig­a­tion thanks to top bars, spe­cify­ing work­book or can­vas head­ers, the abil­ity to work with para­met­ers in fil­ters, plus a wealth of other per­form­ance, data mod­el­ling, and storytelling updates, prove that OAC is once again show­ing its com­mit­ment to enhan­cing the ana­lyt­ics exper­i­ence. As OAC con­tin­ues to evolve, it remains at the fore­front of data ana­lyt­ics, and with this latest release it prom­ises to refine your data-driven decision-mak­ing process.

Our team here at synvert is ready to assist you in explor­ing the full poten­tial of the latest OAC fea­tures. Whether you need a detailed walk­through of what’s new, tips on how to best apply them to your data, or if you just have some ques­tions, our experts are only a mes­sage away. Con­nect with us today to unlock the full power OAC and trans­form your data ana­lyt­ics into a visual nar­rat­ive that brings your data to life!