David Lai's Business Intelligence Blog

Xcelsius Canvas Container

In this article I’ve attached a video that talks about the new Canvas Container feature in Xcelsius 2008 SP3. I found that the Canvas container is very easy to use and provides the same functionality as the group method but allows the flexibility of moving objects in and out of the canvas very easily. I totally recommend that Xcelsius developers use the Canvas container method to group objects...

Xcelsius 2008 advanced workshop

Join the Xcelsius gurus, Mike Alexander (Author, Crystal Xcelsius For Dummies/ Founder, Data Pig Technologies) and Mico Yuk (Founder, Everything Xcelsius / Xcelsius Gurus Network) for a 2-day Xcelsius 2008 advanced workshop this upcoming March 2010 in Dallas, TX! The workshop which contains a wide array of advanced Xcelsius tips and techniques sold out when it was first held in March of 2009 and...

Introduction to Inovista Microcharts

For those of you who have seen or used Bonavistas Microcharts on Excel http://www.bonavistasystems.com/. You’ll appreciate how you can show a huge amount of data on the screen without becoming too overwhelming to the end user. Using data tables with sparklines, bulletgraphs, etc puts data in a format where it is easy to read for the human eye. [kml_flashembed publishmethod=”dynamic”...

Simulating Excel Conditional Formatting in Xcelsius

Conditional formatting in Excel is a feature that is very commonly used and very useful in displaying how well a set of values in a table are doing. Unfortunately we can not transfer the dynamic nature of conditional formatting from Excel to Xcelsius if we were to just insert the table selector object. Basically if the initial binding color of a cell was “Green”, it would stay green even...

All you need to know about opendoc

I’ve seen quite alot of postings in the Business Objects forum on calling the opendoc function from either a web intelligence report or Xcelsius dashboard. You can download the pdf instructions on all the opendoc parameters here opendoc detailed instructions I’ve also provided instructions on drilling down to a Web Intelligence document from Xcelsius here And an Xcelsius open doc worksheet...

Building Scorecards in Xcelsius 2008 and the significance of Global Embedded Fonts

One of the very powerful new additions to Xcelsius 2008 is the ability to create scorecards easily. If we wanted to create scorecards in Xcelsius 4.5 we would need to manually insert trending icons into each row in order to create a scorecard. In Xcelsius 2008 however we can use a label based menu with alerts. The alerts will act as the trending icons and from there we only need one object to show...

Xcelsius 2008 Refresh on Load

One of the major issues I’ve encountered with Xcelsius 2008 was refreshing too many Live Office components on load from the Data Manager. This would cause the browser to crash when loading the swf. I’m not sure if it’s a bug but a workaround I discovered was to use a Reporting Services Button to perform the refresh on load. You can find the button in the Web Connectivity components...

Alpha Numeric Sorter

Here is an Xcelsius Example that ranks your table based on whether you want to rank it numerically or alphabetically. [kml_flashembed publishmethod=”static” fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://www.davidlai101.com/blog/media/blogs/bobj/Excel%20Ranker/Alphanumeric%20Sorter.swf” width=”500″ height=”200″ targetclass=”flashmovie”] [/kml_flashembed] Many...