Oracle^® Business Intelligence Answers, Delivers, and Interactive Dashboards User Guide > Getting Started with Oracle Business Intelligence >

Navigating in Oracle BI

This section explains basic navigation within Oracle BI. It contains the following topics:

• What is Available to You After Accessing Oracle BI
• Using Oracle BI Feature Links
• Working with Oracle BI Pages
• Drilling Down in Oracle BI

What is Available to You After Accessing Oracle BI

When you access Oracle BI, the first screen presented is usually your personal dashboard, named My Dashboard, or a dashboard for your job function. Dashboards typically contains reports and other information for your area of responsibility.

For more information about dashboards, see Using Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards.

Figure 2 shows an example My Dashboard page from a sample Oracle BI application. You can change some aspects of the appearance of the My Dashboard page based on your personal preferences.

NOTE:  Your dashboard may look different than the example.

Figure 2. Example My Dashboard Page

Using Oracle BI Feature Links

This section describes the links that provide access to Oracle BI functions.

• In stand-alone Oracle BI, the links are located in the upper right corner of the screen. The links available to you are determined by your privilege settings.
• In Oracle BI applications, the links are located near the top of the page, if you have permission to access those links. You can access other links as views, such as Dashboards, Answers, Delivers, Alerts, Administration, and My Account. The views that you can access are determined by your role and responsibilities.

Table 2 describes some of the Oracle BI feature links.

Working with Oracle BI Pages

Oracle BI is organized into pages. Pages have two components:

• Panes. Both the Oracle BI Delivers and Oracle BI Answers pages display a left and a right pane. The left pane is the selection pane, used to navigate to, select, and manage saved information. The right pane is used to display and work with the content selected in the left pane.
• Tabs. Tabs provide access to other pages related to the current page. The tabs appear in the top part of the page. The list of available tabs depends on which page you select.

Oracle BI feature links are used to access these pages. Each feature link provides access to a specific feature or topic. Pages can contain other organization and navigation elements, such as tabs, areas, and panes.

For information about feature links, see Using Oracle BI Feature Links.

Drilling Down in Oracle BI

Many of the results that appear in Oracle BI represent hierarchical data structures. Oracle BI metadata specifies these hierarchies, and this allows you to access the different levels of detail within them. For example, information in a sales chart may be categorized by region. Clicking on a specific region in the chart may display each country within that region, if the country is the next level within the hierarchy of the metadata.

You can drill down to an actual item in the database. For example, if you work in sales, you can drill down to the city level within a sales report, and observe that there is a large sale pending in Paris. If you are using an Oracle Siebel operational application, you can then drill down on the pending sale and go directly to that opportunity in the Oracle BI application.

Sorting Columns in Tables in Oracle BI

In a dashboard, the column headers of tables that can be sorted have a slightly raised visual appearance. You can click a column header to sort it.