I’d like to give a big thanks for everyone who participated in the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook Tweetaway contest!
I was very impressed with the huge amount of tweets so Thanks everyone!

I’d like to congratulate the 2 lucky tweeters who have won an eBook copy of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook

They are ……..

rodri_m_d
montoyainigo

Hi everyone! Packt Publishing is having a promotion where we will be giving away 2 free eBook copies of our newly released SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards Cookbook.

On Monday July 25, 2011 we will be randomly drawing 2 winners and grant them access to their free eBooks!

All you need to do to join the Tweetaway twitter contest is to send out a tweet with a link to the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards Cookbook page.

The easiest way is to tweet by clicking on this link! or you can use the share buttons from the PacktPub SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards Cookbook page

Retweeting other tweets is also allowed and there are no limits to how many tweets you can tweet!

Good luck and happy tweeting!!

I hope everyone has had the chance to experiment with the new features on Xcelsius 2008 SP4 as I am already using them for my current client projects.

The following features were added

The new waterfall chart component saves developers the hassle of emulating one using the stacked bar chart and excel logic.  For those of you who haven’t upgraded to SP4 you can find a good example of completing waterfall charts @ http://www.femkekooij.nl/?p=325. To see how much easier and cleaner it is to create a waterfall chart using the waterfall component, check out the example @ http://myxcelsius.com/2011/06/15/xcelsius-2008-sp4-waterfall-chart/

The other major new feature that I consider very useful, is the ability to replace the scorecard component with spreadsheet table alerts.  Please read my post @ http://myxcelsius.com/2011/06/28/xcelsius-2008-sp4-spreadsheet-alerts/ to see how you can use the spreadsheet component to accomplish what you need from a scorecard component and more!

The combination charts having alert capabilities is also very important as we do not have to overlay multiple charts on top of each other anymore to accomplish alerting functionality.

I’m very proud to announce that SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards Cookbook is officially available.  For the past year, Xavier Hacking and I together with Packt Publishing have carefully compiled over 90 recipes on transforming your data into highly effective dashboards.

We cover the ins and outs of using the Dashboard Design components, connecting to different data sources, as well as providing examples on how to use many of the top Xcelsius Addons.  Each recipe contains easy to follow step by step instructions and screenshots on accomplishing each task.  In addition, XLF example source files are also included for every recipe to make sure users are following the recipes correctly.

The book is published in eBook (ePub and DRM-free PDF) and paperback format and is available from the Packt Publishing website

BOCX Speaker Deck

I’d like to send out a special thank you to all of those who attended the Toronto BusinessObjects Customer Exchange yesterday.  The event wouldn’t have been a success without the support of all those who attended. I am hoping that everyone had a great learning experience!

For those who attended my presentation on dashboard essentials, you can download a copy of the presentation deck below

Download powerpoint presentation here