Setting BI Launch Pad and Web Intelligence Preferences
3 Setting BI Launch Pad and Web Intelligence Preferences
This session describes the various settings and preferences you can change (depending on
permissions) to personalise your BI Launch Pad and Web Intelligence environment.
Preferences determine what view is displayed after you log in as there are specific settings for the
various objects that you view, such as viewers for Web Intelligence and other BusinessObjects
documents (such as Crystal Reports).
As a best practice, you should set your preferences before you begin to work with objects in BI Launch
Pad. However, depending on your deployment, your SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Administrator
may have configured your system to use some predetermined settings by default.
There a number of different preferences that can be set depending on your installation (in terms of your
licensing agreement). We will only discuss the settings for BI Launch Pad and Web Intelligence.
3.1
General Preferences
This section describes how to set your general viewing preferences for BI Launch Pad.
‘General’ settings are used by BI Launch Pad and not Web Intelligence.
1. Log on to BI Launch Pad.
2. On the Header Panel, click on ‘Preferences’ :
3. Make any changes to settings (discussed on next page).
4. Click on ‘Save’ or ‘Save and Close’ to apply changes.
NOTE – These buttons are at the bottom of the screen.
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These
Setting BI Launch Pad and Web Intelligence Preferences
Uncheck this setting to set your own preferences.
If you want your Home tab to show a
different view then use the ‘Select
Home tab’ preference to do that.
If you prefer you can set your launch
page to be the Documents tab rather
than the Home tab.
And you can decide what you default
folders and categories you would like
to display within the Drawers of the
Documents tab.
The summary information you want to see displayed (per
object) in the List panel within the Documents tab.
Number of windows you would like
BI Launch Pad to use. See next
page ‘Document Viewing’ for more
details.
Documents (or objects) are listed in
alphanumeric order based on their names.
This setting controls how many objects are
displayed per page.
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Setting BI Launch Pad and Web Intelligence Preferences
In Document Viewing select how you want to view your documents.
‘In the BI Launch Pad portal as tabs’ displays each document on a new tab within a
single browser window.
‘In multiple full screen browser windows, one window for each document’ mode
you will have one window for BI Launch Pad portal and then individual windows for
each document you have open. You then close each window individually by clicking on
the Close button (‘X’ in top right corner of window).
3.2
Changing Password for BI Launch Pad
Use the ‘Change Password’ settings to modify the password you use to Log On to BI Launch Pad.
To change your password:
1. Provide your existing password.
2. Type a new password.
3. Type the new password again for
validation purposes.
Click ‘Save and Close’ to confirm the
changes.
3.3
Locales and Time Zone Preferences
You can specify the language and time zone to use for BI Launch Pad sessions.
This setting determines the language set and date format that
is used by BI Launch Pad, i.e. the language used to display
BI Launch Pad menus, data in documents, etc. Default
setting Use browser locale is recommended, unless you are
away from home and need to change the settings to reflect
your language, etc.
See next page for more details.
See next page for
more details.
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Setting BI Launch Pad and Web Intelligence Preferences
Preferred Viewing Locale:
Data in documents is displayed and saved using the ‘Product Locale’ by default, but you can
override this choosing a different locale here. This then becomes the default viewing/saving
locale for all your documents, unless a document has been saved with a permanent locale
applied to it (to enforce a particular locale).
For Current Time-Zone select the appropriate time zone.
It is important that you check this setting before you schedule any objects to run. The default
time zone is local to the web server that is running SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, not the
Central Management Server (CMS) machine(s) to which each user connects. By properly
setting your time zone, you ensure that your scheduled objects are processed in accordance
with the time zone in which you are working.
3.4
Web Intelligence Preferences
Before you work with Web Intelligence documents in BI Launch Pad, it is recommended that you set the
Web Intelligence preferences to suit your query and reporting needs.
Web is browser
based
HTML
interface.
Rich
Internet
Application
is
browser
based
Java interface.
Desktop is Java
based Windows
application.
PDF offers
interactivity.
no
See overleaf for
more details.
Best to leave as ‘No default universe’, unless
you only have access to a single universe.
Documents can be viewed
using the ‘Product Locale’ by
default, or in your preferred
locale that was specified in
‘Locales and Time Zone –
Preferred Viewing Locale’.
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Setting BI Launch Pad and Web Intelligence Preferences
‘Drill options’ and ‘Start drill session’
are discussed in more detail Section
1.4.1 using some examples.
When saving to MS Excel format:

If you want to display the data in a
format that is similar to working in
Web Intelligence, then select
‘Prioritize the formatting of the
documents’.

If you want to display the data in a
text format then select ‘Prioritize
easy data processing in Excel’.
For Web Intelligence View and Modify preferences:
1. ‘Web’ is HTML based interface that allows you to develop Web Intelligence reports and also
enables users to interact with the reports in view mode.
This interactivity is in view mode, therefore you can develop ‘basic’ reports and other
users with this setting can then modify the reports (but not the queries) to suit their
requirements.
2. ‘Rich Internet Application’ format offers the most functionality enabling you to perform all
aspects of Web Intelligence.
3. ‘Desktop’ offers the same Java based functionality as ‘Advanced’ but requires an application
to be installed on local machine(s).
Discussed in detail later in the session on ‘Web Intelligence Rich Client’.
4. ‘PDF’ offers very little (or no) interactivity and should only be selected if the documents are very
static, i.e. require no interaction.
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