SAP Analytics Cloud QRC4 2024 –Overview and Performance upgrades, New Connections, and Expanded Export functionalities!

SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) is SAP’s cloud-based Business Intelligence platform that provides a range of analytics and reporting tools. It is a fast-evolving product, which gets updated frequently. In this blog, Kris van Brouwershaven takes you through the main takeaways from the latest release for SAP Analytics Cloud: QRC Q4 2024-release, which happened on November 15th – 17th, 2024.

Kris has been working with McCoy & Partners for more than four years and is specialized in SAP Analytics Cloud.

This QRC4 2024-release encapsulates all new features that were introduced in the releases 2024.16 until 2024.22.

Note: This blog will keep Enterprise Planning out of scope.

Improved Admin, Service Management & Support Agent

This update brings us a few upgrades:

1. A new and improved Performance Analysis Tool that helps you pinpoint where your dashboards leak performance.

2. A System Overview-dashboard to show how your tenant is performing, and where your dashboards take the longest to load.
It also gives information into your Licenses, users that have never logged on, Errors, and Trends.

3. A Support Agent that helps when you encounter issues with a Story or your tenant. Use the Support Agent to capture all relevant information to get help.

Data Analyzer Upgrades

With this upgrade, the Data Analyzer is extended with the following:

1. New Chart Types are added:

Combination Column and Line
Combination Stacked Column and Line
Stacked Area

2. Additional Styling: Use Reporting-Template for Table Style

3. Additional Styling: Wrap Text

Also, In-Cell Charts are added. Click on the measure-name to use

Seamless Planning & Live SQL

Note: These are controlled releases, changes can still be made.

With this upgrade, SAC enables Seamless Planning and Live SQL.
Seamless Planning integrates SAC and SAP Datasphere for Planning Use Cases.
With this, you can save planning model data directly into Datasphere.
From SAC, you can now directly:

Deploy Models in Datasphere
Expose Facts and other Public Dimensions.

Live Connectivity to SQL sources enables the connection to Google Big Query (GBQ). Other sources will follow.
Check this blog from SAP to see if your environment is ready for this!

Expanding Data volumes when exporting

When exporting using the ‘Scope = All’ he maximum limits when exporting to .CSV- or .XLSX-files is expanded to:

CSV: 10 million cells / 300 columns
XLSX: 10 million cells /300 columns / 1,048,576 rows

This enables the users to export to the full capability of Excel, providing more flexibility in Ad-Hoc Analysis.

Bulk Migration from Classic to Optimized

We already wrote about this in our blog: SAP Analytics Cloud Deprecation Warning: Classic Stories & Applications
With this feature, you can bulk-select and convert all the stories that you want. This conversion has to happen before the second half of 2025, with this feature you can perform bulk-conversions – meaning you don’t have to
You can find this under Stories, where you need to navigate to Story Conversion.

Here, you can select the stories you want to convert, and click on the ‘Convert to Optimized Story’-button.

Other features

The following new features are also included in the latest upgrade:

Include and Exclude story filters and calculations in bookmarks.
Option to overwrite all existing widget styling when applying a theme. Reset is also an option.
Enable and disable buttons using scripting.
Preloading and caching in the Presentation Mode: difference between interactive and non-interactive widgets.

Previous releases of SAP Analytics Cloud

Are you curious about the previous releases of SAP Analytics Cloud? Check our other blogs:

Would you like to know more about SAP Analytics Cloud or Reporting in general? Feel free to reach out to Kris van Brouwershaven.

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