I look forward to seeing everyone at Vancouver’s very first local SAP Inside Track Wednesday Sept 15, 2010!

I’ve been given the great opportunity to represent Xcelsius Gurus Network and present on SAP Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius).

I’ll be presenting the following topics and have a thorough Questions and Answer period.

• Why are dashboards used and what are the benefits?
• Dashboard Design and Best Practices
• Dashboard Connectivity – Enterprise and Non Enterprise
• Xcelsius best practices with the designer and internal spreadsheet
• Xcelsius Tips and Tricks
• Xcelsius resources

For more information on the event please visit the event WIKI at

http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/events/SAP+Inside+Track+Vancouver+2010

I’ve had this error pop up while trying to open Excel files (Excel 2007) after installing Live Office on several machines where it says “There was a problem sending the command to the program“. A couple other people ran into the same issue, so I’d like to post a quick solution.

1. Open the Excel program
2. Go to Excel Options
3. Go to Advanced
4. Go to General
5. Make sure “Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)” is unchecked.

That’s all!

This article talks about using the filtered rows technique instead of a VLOOKUP.
Not until Xcelsius 2008 came out, were we able to filter on multiple rows of data that matched 1 entry. So in order to accomplish this we would either have to use VLOOKUP or INDEX MATCH. Using this technique was very cumbersome and although filtered rows has been available for a while, I have been on a couple engagements where I still see VLOOKUPS in the excel spreadsheet!

Thus hopefully writing this article will get the practice of using filtered rows ingrained in the
Xcelsius Developers minds.

I’ve created a video below that shows 2 scenarios below using VLOOKUP and filtered rows. I’ve shown how much easier it is to use filtered rows and how much easier it is in the future to maintain.

I’ve also attached the source files from the 2 examples so you may do your own comparisons.

You may download the source files here

The Push Button is a powerful new feature in Xcelsius SP3 that allows developers to transfer source data from an arbitrary sized cell block to a destination cell block of the same size. This gives us a triggering type mechanism where we needed to jump through hoops in order to accomplish before.

I’ve attached a video and the example xlf source file which shows how to use the push button as a default/reset button.

If you have any additional examples that you would like to share, please post them on the comments section below.

Please download the source file here

Dynamic Color Binding is a great new feature in Xcelsius SP3 that allows developers to dynamically bind colors. This gives developers total flexibility on dynamically customizing their coloring schema during run time.

I’ve attached a video which shows a couple examples on using dynamic color binding.

If you have any additional examples that you would like to share, please post them on the comments section.