Art of BI: Oracle BICS Basics: Creating a Project

In this post I would simply like to take you through making art out of your favorite data set. Using the immense technology behind Oracle Data Visualizer on the Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service (BICS) we will go through uploading a spreadsheet and creating art with it. The process is so simple it would allow any User with a spreadsheet to create multitudes of charts, graphs, or how I like to put it, any Art they desire.

Let’s begin.

We will Log into Oracle Cloud, and find the Oracle BICS home page displayed.

We will select Visual Analyzer projects to create our first project. Then click on Create Project

We will then upload our excel sheet into the Oracle Data Visual Analyzer

Once we have uploaded our excel sheet, we have the option to edit the Source Name and Description if needed. We can also exclude any columns by hovering over the column name and clicking the Check Mark. And finally we can alter the default selection of Attributes and Measures made for our columns. In this case we will change the TRANSACTION_KEY to an Attribute, and then Click on Add to Project.

Note that we now have our excel sheet added to the project and on the left hand side we have the Sheet Table name and our columns displayed.

As our first visualization we want to view which region has the highest sales. We can do that simply by dragging and dropping the STORE_REGION and the TOTAL_SALES columns onto our canvas where it indicates for us to “Drop Visualizations or Data Elements here”.

By default a Pivot table is created showing the Total Sales by Store Region. There is a vast array of visualizations to choose from. We also have options to add filters and/or add a few calculations to our report.

Let us save our project as Pet Store Inventory Analysis. We will click on Save project, Enter the Project Name and a brief description, and then click OK.

Notice that the “Untitled” title is now replaced with Pet Store Inventory Analysis.

In order to retrieve your saved project at a later time, navigate to Catalog and you will find it there

We then will want to give our report a more meaningful title, for example: Top Store Regions. The report title is automatically created from the names of the columns we’ve chosen. In order to change that we will Right-Click the report title “TOTAL_SALES by STORE_REGION” and select properties.

As you can see the Title is set to Auto by default. We will choose Custom and enter Top Sales Region in our title box, and simply click out of the properties box.

Now let us create some art out of this data. The purpose being, we want users to immediately identify our objective, which is instantly viewing which Region makes the most Sales without having to look into numbers.

We will select a Pie Chart visualization by choosing Pie from the drop down list besides the Pivot Table.

By default 3 pie charts are created for each Store Region.

Obviously this doesn’t tell us much, so we will change the assignment of the data to show one pie chart reflecting the total sales across the three store regions. We will do this by hovering over the report and clicking Assignment

Then dragging the STORE_REGION to the Color Palette as shown below

We’re almost done. We now have a Pie chart showing us the percentages of Sales across the Store regions.

However we still don’t see the Region Name that stands out having the highest sales. In order to do that right-click on the Pie Chart (or click on Menu), select Properties and for the Data Values select Value and Label in order to show the Store Region name along with the Percentage Sales. Our user may also hover over each section of the Pie chart to view the Value of the Total Sales for further analysis.

And that’s it, we’re done!

Till next time, Happy Art making.