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 here is why….

• Learn how to enhance your data models with advanced Excel functions
• Learn powerful dashboard design and charting techniques
• Learn tricks that will help to optimize the performance of your Xcelsius dashboards
• Gain a solid understanding of XML and XML connectivity in Xcelsius
• Create server-based logins for your Xcelsius dashboards
• Learn how to pass parameters from one Xcelsius dashboard to another
• Learn how create detailed drill-throughs in Xcelsius using encoded URLs
• Learn how to use your Xcelsius dashboards to write back to your server

Much more…

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.

Microcharts for Xcelsius provides us with the advanced table features that Xcelsius lacks. Well there are Xcelsius workarounds that can produce similar results but at the cost of performance, maintainance and formatting problems.

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 though it were to change to “Red” when the value changes.

Please view my video on how to simply accomplish this using a grid component in Xcelsius

Please visit my post on “MyXcelsius” for a more advanced example of conditional formatting in Xcelsius involving dynamic sliders and charts.

You can download the source file for the example here

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 template that you can use here

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 our indicators.

Here are some simple instructions to create a scorecard.