Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation on BI Web Services at SAP Inside Track Vancouver 2011!

A replay of the presentation can be found at the following link => http://bit.ly/rkBU1p

I’ve also attached the powerpoint presentation that you can download here

I hope that everyone has had a great start to 2011!
2010 was a huge year but 2011 looks to be even bigger!

I’m very pleased to announce that the Xcelsius Cookbook, which Xavier Hacking and I have been working very hard on, is scheduled to be released in it’s final format on May 2011.

The book will be structured like a cookbook where we will go through step by step on accomplishing different tasks (recipes) in Xcelsius.

In addition we will be showcasing some of the more popular 3rd party addons, provide best practices for development, as well as provide some real life dashboard examples built using recipes learned from the cookbook.

The book is currently available as RAW (Read as we write) format since it is currently under development, so feel free to check it out at the Packt Publishing website for more information.  In addition, since SAP is re-branding Xcelsius yet again, the book name will most likely change to SAP Business Objects Dashboards Cookbook.  Stay Tuned for updates!

Thanks for all your support!

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

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 instead of the old grouping method.

I am curious of the canvas container performance and if it is buggy as I have not experienced any problems yet, so please feel free to comment with your experiences.

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 category.

When dealing with a lot of live office objects here are some simple rules to follow.

1. Only use the Refresh on Load from the Data Manager to refresh cells that contain data for objects such as dropdown selectors.

2. Chart data for example that needs to be refreshed on load should be done through the Reporting Services Button

I’ve also attached a Whitepaper from Business Objects that talks about the Refresh on Load from Xcelsius 2008.

Download White Paper

In short, when refreshing on load from the data manager, data is refreshed while the objects are rendering which may cause an overload on the flash player. Whereas refresh on load from the Reporting Services button will occur after all the components have been rendered.