Xcelsius Blog You Must Bookmark

Posted on January 19, 2012 by

Over the last few months, I have been a regular visitor to Josh Tapley’s blog, http://data-ink.com/. His natural design aesthetic coupled with technique is something I admire, and his willingness to share with the community is something that should be appreciated by anyone who is using his tools/techniques.

I reached out to Josh to learn more about him and his experience and wanted to share with you:

Q: When did you learn how to approach dashboard design best practices?

A: I learned about Edward Tufte and Stephen Few right before I began using Xcelsius, which significantly impacted my design style.  I’m completely self taught utilizing online blogs (EverythingXcelsius, MyXcelsius and HackingSAP) as well as the very active LinkedIn groups.

Q: When did you start using Xcelsius?

A: My first public splash with my Xcelsius work was for the 2010 Reportapalooza.  I continued to practice with the software to make sure that I didn’t lose in 2011 (even though that competition never came).  During that time, Kalyan Verma asked me to guest blog on his site and I founded my own blog to showcase my work.

Q: What dashboard are you most proud of:

A: Late summer of last year I placed as a winner in the ‘Dig-In’ category for the Strata O’Reilly Conference in a data visualization competition that was judged in part by Juice Analytics.  My interactive dashboard was a Xcelsius solution that I built in a single weekend.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Now I’ve left my previous career in health care to join Ron Keler (fellow Xcelsius blogger) as a BI consultant at Cleartelligence specializing in dashboard design.

Make sure you check out and bookmark Josh’s blog:  http://data-ink.com/

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Posted in Dashboards | 1 Comment

How does Xcelsius Jive with SAP’s Mobile First Strategy

Posted on January 11, 2012 by

At the tail end of last week there was a bit of dooms-day chatter on Twitter around Xcelsius, and this week I saw two posts from Steve Lucas on Flash Demise and Mobile-First. This activity sparked a lot of buzz and debate on the web. So how could I resist chiming in?

In the next few years, customers will have more choices than ever for how they will approach dashboards and visualization, but they will have to prioritize based on needs and budget. Once again, it will come down to choosing the right tools for the job..

1. Xcelsius with some kind of HTML5 ported option yet to be announced, which we have to assume will be a subset of Xcelsius functionality.

2. SAP mobile enabled solutions like Explorer / Exploration views and BI Mobile (webi mobilized)

3. Xcelsius coupled with a third party offering like Antivia XWIS Anywhere and Exxova MyBI Mobile,

4. Third party mobile visualization products like Roambi.

This list will be prioritized based on the following questions that every customer will need to ask themselves for an entire BI initiative and for specific projects:

  • Is the end users primarily a mobile user or desktop user?
  • How important is mobility for the dashboard? Must have, should have, nice to have?
  • Will the technology(s) in question provide the results required by the end users?

I will likely do a full write-up to compare and contrast these approaches once BI4 release pack 3 hits the market this quarter.

So what about Xcelsius?

The reality is that Xcelsius, like any other technology, will have to evolve or be replaced. The “Xcelsius” as we know it, which is a Flash and Excel powered technology wrapped up in an desktop development environment, has a shelf life. SAP is NOT killing off a product, because it is hardly a move that we would expect for a highly successful and profitable technology. The SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards prooduct has a large customer base, thriving community, and a great ecosystem of partners who are continuously innovating platform. What ever the fate of Xcelsius is, SAP’s “Mobile First” is a clear strategy shift that will not happen over night.

Is the future clear or cloudy?

While SAP has sat on Xcelsius, the company’s focus has shifted towards growth opportunities like Big Data, Cloud, Social, and Mobility…it is baked into our brains as SAP customers and partners. There is a common thread here that is critical to the success to all of these initiatives: “End user experiences.”. Most of these strategic growth areas for SAP, have integration back to the core Business Analytics product lines. So the question we all have is what exactly will SAP’s next-generation “mobile first” dashboard solution look like? Will SAP truly innovate in this area? Or will the huge ecosystem of software vendors beat them to the punch?

Let me know what you guys think.

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Posted in BI4, Dashboards, Xcelsius | 4 Comments

What I am Excited about BI4

Posted on October 26, 2011 by

With BI4 finally generally available there are several cool things that have been introduced. As I mentioned in my video interview, Event Insight is a very interesting module that opens the doors for some of the real time exception tracking that customers have long asked for.

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Posted in BI4, Dashboards | Leave a Comment

Merging Xcelsius Projects

Posted on September 26, 2011 by
export

You put blood sweat and tears into a dashboard design element and want to re-use it in another project. This question often arises, so if you are not aware, you can copy and paste components between 2 instances of Xcelsius.

There are a few best practices to accomplish this successfully, ensuring the copy and paste will not only hold your bindings, but also not crash or corrupt your project.

STEP 1: Match up your XLF files

Excel

There needs to be some consistency between your Xcelsius project files before you copy and paste. The most important is Excel ranges and tabs. The tab names where your components are linked need to be identical. In other words, if you have a chart that is bound to a range called ‘Sheet1′!$D$2:$D$5 your new XLF project will also need to have a range available called ‘Sheet1′!$D$2:$D$5. Otherwise your bindings will be lost.

If you are pasting into a project that already has tab names established, you can always go back to your original XLF and change the Excel tab names. If you do this, make sure you save your XLF as a new version before copying anything over.

Xcelsius Skin

If your old XLF project uses a different skin than the new one, all of your custom color configuration and styling could be lost. Make sure the skin for your new XLF is the same as the old.

Step 2: Copy over data

If you want to use data from your old XLF inside of the new project, you will need to copy data from Excel sheets. Unfortunately in many cases it is not quite as simple as it should be. My recommendation is to go into your old XLF, click on the Data menu, and then Export Data. Open the Excel sheet and paste from Excel into your new XLF.  Once again you need to make sure that if you are copying formulas, you paste into the exact same range and that your XLF contains the correct tab names.

 

Step 3: Copy your Components

This is the easy part! Select the components that you would like to copy from your canvas or the Xcelsius Object Browser. Press Ctrl & “C” to copy the components. Inside your new XLF, press “Ctrl” & “V” to paste your components. With your new components inserted, you will want to close your old XLF and save your new XLF. I have seen odd behavior over the years with Excel and Xcelsius when you have more than one Xcelsius project open.

Let me know if you run into any problems or nuances. I have avoided several of them using the process described above.

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Posted in Component Best Practices, Creative Workarounds, Dashboards, Xcelsius | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Current time in Xcelsis using Yahoo time service

Posted on July 9, 2011 by

If you need the current time in a dashboard, the Excel formula is NOW() is useful for many scenarios. If the local PC time is not adequate I found a slick Yahoo web service that will provide me with a single XML node with current time:

http://developer.yahoo.com/util/timeservice/V1/getTime.html

1. First I used XML Maps in Excel and Xcelsius to import the current time from the yahoo service.

2. The next problem is that the data is a UNIX timestamp, so I found a formula to fix this:
=C5/(60*60*24)+1/1/1970 WHERE C5 is the time retuned from the Yahoo service.

3. The results are in GMT so you may need to make adjustments.. In my requirement for PST, I took the resulting time and subtracted “7:00:00 AM” which is how you subtract 7 hours in Excel.

4. I took it one final step to subtract the expiration date from current time and then format it as “dd:hh:mm” This tells end users not the current time, but rather the difference from current time the expiration.

Hopefully this time I spent figuring this out will save you a little time of your own building dashboards.

CLICK HERE for excel source file. The Yahoo web service is not included because I couldn’t add it without giving up my ID:

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Creative Workarounds, Dashboards, Excel Logic, Xcelsius | 4 Comments

Monitoring the Japan Earthquakes

Posted on March 12, 2011 by

Having lived through quite a few earthquakes, I can’t imagine what the people of Japan are feeling with so many large earthquakes. I have been monitoring the earthquakes all day using our GMaps Plugin earthquake tracker. As you can see, the earthquakes are located right along a major fault line. One of our own at Centigon Solutions has family in Japan who are doing o.k, so we hope that others were able to connect and ensure the safety of friends and family.

Earthquake dashboard

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Dashboards, Xcelsius | 1 Comment

Gas Price at the Pump Dashboard V3

Posted on March 7, 2011 by

Gas prices are on the rise again, and as I paid $4.50 for premium gas this weekend, I wanted to re-visit an older gas price at the pump dashboard. Replacing my static map with GMaps Plugin V3, we now can navigate gas prices by grade across the united states. I have been searching high and low for a daily gas price by US county feed, or more importantly a good international data feed.

What are you paying where you live for gas?
VIEW FULL SIZE DASHBOARD

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Dashboards, Widgets | 19 Comments

GMaps Plugin 2.1 is Available

Posted on October 5, 2010 by

Today, Centigon Solutions made available the latest version of GMaps Plugin for Xcelsius, SAP Crystal Dashboard Design, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards. Learn More

Don’t let the “2.1″ version number itself fool you because this new iteration of our dashboard mapping solution is a more substantial jump forward in performance and new features than 2.0 was from 1.0. The two major themes of this release was performance and tighter integration with Xcelsius. The results are profound with up to 20x map performance thanks to a brand new marker architecture. As an Xcelsius developer myself, I am finally able to create the exact user experiences I have been urging for now that I get enhanced bi-directional communication with other Xcelsius functionality.

If you had taken a look at GMaps Plugin in the past and put it down due to any integration or performance concerns, it is absolutely worth picking back up. You can get a full rundown of the enhancements here: Whats new in 2.1?

Click here to download a trial

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Dashboards, Xcelsius Add-Ons | 3 Comments

Xcelsius Earthquake Tracker

Posted on January 13, 2010 by

Living in southern California and having lived in Los Angeles, the threat of earthquakes is normal. With heavy news coverage of earthquakes these last few weeks, I decided to put together a quick Xcelsius visualization. 15 minutes of research and Xcelsius work led to a Google Map that displays a live XML feed of worldwide earthquakes. Dragging the slider will filter out eathquakes under the user specified magnitude. If anyone has any ideas of some interesting data that I should mashup with the earthquake data feel to share with the group and I will see what I can do to quickly integrate it.

I have included the source files so you can see how it was built.

Source Files
*Requires GMaps Plugin- Get a free trial here.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Dashboards, Xcelsius | 30 Comments

SAP 505 World Championship Xcelsius Dashboard

Posted on August 24, 2009 by

From strategy to execution, organizations navigate their respective markets carefully as they compete for market share and revenue. Boat racing faces similar challenges for executing against strategy as I learned during a development project for the 2009 SAP 505 World Championships. For this race, I assisted with the development of a race strategy/execution dashboard that couples business intelligence dashboard technology with sailing technology and domain knowledge. The resulting collaborative effort led to the development of an innovative dashboard.

This Xcelsius dashboard features two modes: strategy and race (execution). Strategic planning requires cultivation of information from many different sources. While data retrieval presents unique challenges, mashing it together in one visual compilation is another. For this particular dashboard, vendors and domain experts collaborated to produce powerful results in an extremely short period of time.

505 Races

To plan either business or race strategy, you need to predict conditions and then plot a course of action. Based on date/time inputs and wind prediction inputs, the dashboard retrieves data from Local Knowledge software to plot ocean currents (yellow lines). The strength and direction of the current is visualized in a visual grid within the Google Map. Upwind laylines (red dots) are controlled by current, wind, and a profile based on the 505 boats. Local Knowledge software does all of the heavy lifting and returns laylines and currents through a custom web service.

505 Races

Monitoring execution is the second challenge not easily achieved as conditions change. While the strategy tab relies on user input for wind conditions and a starting point, which ultimately affects the course itself, the race tab presents real-time views of this information . Real time GPS locations of all boats and marks (marks shown as red pins) are provided via Trac-Trac. On the fly, the dashboard retrieves laylines and routes based on real time information including wind conditions. Trac-Trac also provides additional information for each boat including boat direction and position.

All of this information is fed through Xcelsius into Centigon Solutions GMaps Plugin, which was extended to meet the challenges of this project.

A public facing version of this dashboard is available for you to viewing at: http://explorer.sap.com/505/ and during the event, will include real-time commentary feed by renowned sailing expert Kimball Livingston.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Dashboards, Xcelsius | 1 Comment
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