In this article I would like to talk about some important features that Inovista Microcharts has that Xcelsius cannot reproduce. A very important table component that Xcelsius lacks is the ability to expand and contract your rows like a tree. Inovista has a component called a “Microchart Tree Grid” that allows a user to expand and contract rows so that users can group their rows accordingly. This is extremely important if we don’t want to clutter a table view with too many rows.

Below is a sample that I have taken from the Inovista website that shows a Tree table in action.

Looking further into the example, there are 2 additional components inside the tree table that Xcelsius cannot reproduce. First of all, Xcelsius does not have the ability to create a bulletgraph, which is quite a popular item used in dashboards. In addition, the ability to create checkmarks and other shapes would be very hard to reproduce in Xcelsius; thus is another component lacking in Xcelsius since many dashboards contain checkmarks and stars for ratings. The option to put the x-axis scale on the header or y-axis scale on each graph is also a useful feature that Inovista provides for the Microcharts table and Microcharts treegrid. Finally the ability to move the columns around is also another useful feature that Xcelsius does not allow.

There are however, a few problems that remain with the treegrid which comes mainly from the column sorting ability. Please use the example below as a reference.

The first problem comes from the fact that sorting only occurs alphabetically and cannot be modified to be sorted numerically. For example if we have the following numbers 1, 2, 19; the sort order will be 1, 19, 2 which is incorrect. The next problem is that the Microcharts treegrid doesn’t sort by parent and then child. For example if you expand the parent nodes and try to sort the items, the result will be a messed up list where child nodes are all over the place.

Sorting is an important element but not a show stopper so hopefully the author fixes these problems for the next Inovista release.

The final important feature that Inovista provides that Xcelsius cannot reproduce is the IMT slider, which is similar to the slider that you find in the finance.google.com charts and biz.yahoo.com charts. This is extremely useful as it allows users to intuitively view a window of time that they are interested in.
]]> http://davidlai101.com/blog/2009/10/20/inovista-microcharts-part-2/feed/ 1 http://davidlai101.com/blog/2009/08/11/beware-of-frederick-carter-pathway-techn/ http://davidlai101.com/blog/2009/08/11/beware-of-frederick-carter-pathway-techn/#comments Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:30:18 +0000 David Lai This is a warning to all consultants and anyone who has professional contact with Frederick Carter.

I’ve worked with many clients in the BI and BOBJ industry and unfortunately this is the first customer that I have provided services for who ran away without paying. Apparently Frederick needed some work accomplished in a short period of time and I was generous enough to complete a week’s worth of Xcelsius work without even taking a deposit.

Luckily, towards the end of a week’s work, I accidentally heard one of his conversations with his accomplice “Dianne Sawyer” saying that he was going to stiff me and not pay. In addition, he said that “The client he was trying to score the contract with thinks that all the Xcelsius work was done by him, and that he could learn how to be an Xcelsius and Business Objects expert in 1 week”. I called him up on this and he kept making excuses that he was having cash flow problems. He said that he would promise to pay if I would do a few more hours of work for him so that he could score a contract with Fannie Mae. So, out of sympathy I completed a few hours of work for him and after the work was completed, he started ignoring my emails and phone calls regarding payment.

After he found out he got kicked out of the linked in group “Xcelsius Gurus” since he ripped off another Xcelsius Consultant “Kalyan Verma”, he started begging me to get him back into the group and offered to pay off his debt in payments. I was nice enough to agree and he paid an initial payment of $200. However a week later he purposely closed his account on paypal and the $200 payment got reversed.

After that he has ignored all calls and emails.

I hope this posting will expose and help prevent Frederick Carter from ripping off anymore consultants and businesses since we all work hard for our living. For those who are interested, I have all the chat logs and emails sent back and forth between us to prove everything that happened.

Here is a link to his linked-in profile

http://www.linkedin.com/in/frederickcarter

His Corporation is Pathway Technologies Inc.
His Accomplice is Dianne Sawyer

Thanks again to everyone who reads my blog and I hope that my articles have proven useful

Cheers
David