A beginner's guide to starting your SAP Analytics Cloud learning journey
What is SAP Analytics Cloud?
SAP Analytics cloud or also known in the abbreviated form SAC, is SAP's current business intelligence (BI), augmented analytics, predictive analytics, and enterprise planning software as a service product.
Where should I start?
To become acquainted with the basics of the tool, it's UI and foundational features, I recommend learning the data visualization features first and building a dashboard off static Excel-based data models as you'll learn below. The reason you want to start off in the BI portion is that it's the easiest way to ease yourself into the world of SAC as it's almost similar to building charts in Excel with a few more advanced features in this SAP cloud based analytics product.
Create a Trial instance of SAC
To accelerate your learning you'll need an instance of SAC to get hands on with.
The only way to get a hands on account is to sign up for the SAC trial instance for 90 days. Technically you can also extend this trial up to 60 days for a total of 150 days but check the terms and conditions as SAP are likely to change this as they see fit.
Given SAP have a time limitation, don't create this account until you know you can commit time to building dashboards in SAC.
Follow the instructions on getting your first instance up and running here:
Enroll into Open SAP course SAC5
This part is easy. Navigate to openSAP course SAP Analytics Cloud – Become an Augmented BI Expert and simply create an openSAP account if you don't have one and enroll into the course. Before you scoff at me about just leading to you a training course that SAP freely provide, hear me out first. There are some lessons learnt I picked up that will optimize your learning approach to building your skills in SAC.
Tip 1: Use the trial tenant to complete hands on exercises
Most likely by the time you read this post, SAP would probably have disabled the tenants they provided for this course and you won't be able to access them. Without these resources readily available it can be easy to give up or resign to just watching the videos. Don't do this!
Tip 2: Follow the instructors and get hands on step by step
With your trial SAC instance at hand, the most important step is to build as the instructors demonstrate the features of SAC in the video. Follow along by repeating their steps and pausing the video every 30 seconds if you need. Watching the videos in one sitting is difficult to follow and retain the knowledge but if you take the time to build as they do you'll get throught he content faster.
Tip 3: Master the data model as a priorty!
The hardest part of dashboarding is getting the data model right. Too often we get caught up in the visuals and design when we build a dashboard from scratch. By taking the time to really learn data wrangling in SAC you'll be well prepared for your real projects to get this part right. In my experience with SAC dashboards, 80% of the work is done in the data model and once you start on the visuals you're on the home stretch. Don't get distracted by trying to short cut to data visualization.
Optional: Challenge yourself
To really solidify the skills you've learnt in the SAC course I recommend building more dashboards based off static data and or finding live OData API's that are available online. Quantity of dashboard creation will really solidify your skills and you can build a portfolio to show off your talents.
For inspiration I like to browse the subreddit /r/dataisbeautiful - you could try to get the underlying datasets and recreate the visualizations yourself.
Another approach is to find datasets and API's, bring them into SAC and visualize them.