You’re no doubt aware that SAP Enable Now ships with multiple Bubble Styles that you can use in your simulations (and Book Pages). You may also know that you can customize these Bubble Styles, or create your own – for example, to match your corporate branding. What you may not know is that there are a set of Bubble Style Templates on which Bubble Styles are defined – and not all of these are used in the provided Bubble Styles.
The following graphic shows all of the Bubble Style Templates that are available (out of the box – and ignoring ‘Expert’ ones which may be installed by your Implementation Consultant). The Template name is shown as the Title in each case (but note that, for some reason, Titles can only be specified when the Bubble is used within a Book Page – and not within a simulation).
Some of these will look familiar, as they are used for the default Bubble Styles. Specifically, they are used as follows:
- Black Forest, Quartz, and Green Meadow all use the Big Title Bar template
- Blue Ocean, Tutorial Yellow, and White Island all use the Rounded Corners template
- Blue Sunset, Bright Yellow, Dark-Gray Green Title, and SAP Gold all use the Edge Bar template
- Yellow Note uses the Sticky Note template
To define your own Bubble Style, open the Style Editor (from menu option Tools | Customization | Edit Style Resources), click New, and select the appropriate template (see above) in the Template field. But here’s where it gets complicated. Each of the Templates has a specific set of properties available for it; some properties are common to all Templates but some are specific to one or two Templates. And in true SAP style, sometimes the same property exists for multiple Templates, but has a slightly different name in each of them!
Of course what I want to do is make things easier for you. So in the table below, I list the properties available for each of the Templates. Check this table to see which Template has the properties that will allow you to create the style of Bubble you want, and then base your new Bubble Style on this Template.
For example, if you want to be able to customize the width of the border, you will need to use Rounded Corners, Rectangular, or Thick Border. If you want the Bubble to be slightly transparent, you will need to use Big Title Bar, and so on.
You can then tweak your custom Bubble Style definition by changing these properties to your heart’s content. Mostly this will be changing the various colors (at which point I’d suggest setting up a custom Color Scheme first), but some Bubble Style Templates offer additional options. You may need to play around to find what works for you (especially as it’s not always obvious what some of the properties do) – just remember to click Update Preview each time you make a change, so you can see the effect.
Great article very clear.
Would be useful to know if we could add Icons as well
Adding icons other than the default four you have for Explanation Bubbles? No, sadly not possible. But it is a rich text editor, and you can add your own images in-line – and with some judicious use of a table you can force alignment to match that of the Explanation bubble – although that wouldn’t appear correctly in the printed documents that include the icons…
So I could add the client’s letters DAI in a corner?
I appreciate the reply.
In every Bubble?? Seems a bit excessive… You could default that text into the Bubble Text in the Authoring Settings > Macro Initialization, but there would be nothing to stop Authors from removing it during editing. For Bubbles used in Book Pages you could use the Title and add the letters in that, but oddly Bubbles in simulations do not have a Title.
After customizing a new bubble style how can I make it the default standard bubble style for a work area?
In your Authoring Settings, go to Macro Initialization > Interactions, and for each action (and separately for Demo Bubble and Practice Bubble) change the (bubble) Style setting. And then do the same thing in your Playback Settings, under Macro Fallback Defaults.
I’m editing enable now recordings. To be clear I should explain that one of the parameters to be adhered to in this project is info bubble shape. The desired bubble shapes are requested to be long and skinny(height) and I would pay money to learn if there is some trick to cause the bubbles to snap to the minimum length before they become twice as tall by moving text to next line. Currently the direction is keep making it shorter until it doubles in height and then back track to make (most) text single line.
Any correspondence would be welcomed.!
Happy Editing!
R
Rick: This is a complaint that’s been made for a long time (including by myself) – SAP Enable Now has a tendency to make tall thin bubbles. Unfortunately there’s not a great deal you can do to influence the proportions. The only thing there is, is the default Width, which you can set via Authoring Settings > Macro Initialization > Interactions > …. This Width defaults to 150px, and SAP Enable Now will religiously stick to this, expanding the Bubble vertically as much as necessary (even if this means making the bubble taller than the actual screenshot). So all I can suggest is you significantly increase this (to maybe 600px) and you’ll likely have less adjustment do, but you’ll almost certainly still have to make adjustments to quite a few bubbles. (It does sound like your standards are a little over-prescriptive, though…).
FYI, I just added a Customer Improvement Request to ask for Bubbles to always be resized in the same ratio as the default size. Feel free to go vote it up: https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/idea/274664