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.
