How many of you SAP BW Developers have given swish demos to business users, with all the functionality they could wish for, only for them to turn around and state that the branding is not correct and that it doesn't have the right company look and feel. This can be very frustrating, but first impressions of any report/demo are very important and branding is often overlooked. This happened to me whilst working for a large multi national company, where branding was very high on the agenda. Below is a simple one-stop-shop to create and implement a branded BEx workbook/query in SAP BW7.0

BEx Templates

These steps provide a basic and easy solution to implementing a branded look and feel to queries and workbooks in Business Explorer (BEx)

The first step is to open BEx and run a query. I would expect that the query look and feel is that of the SAP standard "Tradeshow" style as set by default. The next step is to set your desired company colours in the Excel palate. To do this. go to Tools --> Options and select the Colour tab. Here you can modify existing excel colours and change using the RGB colour model.

You are now ready to brand your workbook. Access the SAP styles, this can be done via the excel toolbar, go to Format --> Styles. The following box will appear

Here you will see over 40 styles to change. Some are fairly obvious, for example; SAPBEXHLevel1. This style will change the look and feel of all hierarchies at level1. others are less obvious, for example SAPBEXaggItem is what I would call the results heading.

An easy and quick way to change the styles of the workbook and see the effects straight away is to click on any cell in the query, for example click on a characteristic heading and then go to Format -->Style. You will find that the style for characteristic headings appears by default (SAPBEXchaText). This is the same with any cell in the query, its style is pre-selected when you go to Format -->Style. It is for this reason a alone that I find it easier to brand the workbook with a query already open. This being said, it is limited to how complex the query is, as its fairly likely that your query will not have every possible style, it is at this point where a bit of trial and error may come into it.

Brand of all the features from the design toolbar is also possible, for example the navigation block, drop down box and text boxes. For this reason it is worth adding a few of these to your query and changing the styles in exactly the same way as specified above. As you go about changing various styles, you will find that quite a few actually share the same style, for example characteristic headings share the same style as the filter options in the navigational block (SAPBEXchaText).

These steps above should have you branding your workbooks in know time at all. Below is an example of a simple branded workbook. Don't forget to add logos, project identifiers and help line details as appropriate.

The next step is to set your newly created branded workbook as default, so whenever you open any query it opens up with these new branded styles. Again, this only takes a a few simple steps.

1. Remove the drill down of all the columns so you are left with a couple of cells.

2. Save the workbook into a role in BEx with a logical name like "Branded Workbook Template"

3. Log out of BEx and log back in. Open the workbook you have just saved

3. Go to the global settings icon on the BEx analyzer toolbar.

4. Here you can set which workbook is set as default. Click on the "Current workbook" selection and click set as default.

This workbook has now been set as default for your user and any query that you open will appear with your branded styles. Any new workbooks that you create and save will also now save in these styles. Any existing workbooks will continue to use the styles that were in place when that workbook was created.

End users will have to follow steps 3 and 4 in order to set the branded template as default. This is very simple and can be done as part of user training.

Happy Branding....