Archive for the ‘Tips and Tricks’ Category
Xcelsius Dynamic Color Binding
Dynamic Color Binding is a great new feature in Xcelsius SP3 that allows developers to dynamically bind colors. This gives developers total flexibility on dynamically customizing their coloring schema during run time.
I’ve attached a video which shows a couple examples on using dynamic color binding.
If you have any additional examples that you would like to share, please post them on the comments section.
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 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
Alpha Numeric Sorter
Here is an Xcelsius Example that ranks your table based on whether you want to rank it numerically or alphabetically.
Many of you may have had the trouble of trying to sort a table of data. If you only need to sort alphabetically, then the listview object works fine. However, it does not work with numerics where 12 will come ahead of 6.

The first picture shows how to rank numbers. As you can see the alpha will come in as ascending order. This can easily be done through your Live Office or Web Service Query. If the data is static you can just go to Data -> Sort in Excel and choose Data Column A. The reason for this is that the Countif function has a bug in Excel where if you execute COUNTIF($A$2:$A$6,”>” & A2), it will interpret it as COUNTIF($A$2:$A$6,”=” & A2)
The simple Rank formula for the numeric column that I used takes the rank of each row and spits back the number. It also takes into account if there are duplicate numeric columns. If there is then it uses the COUNTIF($B$2:B2,B2)-1) part to increment the rank accordingly.

Once we have our ranking setup, we have our index match formula that will match the appropriate column to the index.
I’ve attached the source files below that you can reuse for your own pleasure. There are some additional comments in the Excel file that explains more about what is going on for those of you who are curious.




Xcelsius Push Button
The Push Button is a powerful new feature in Xcelsius SP3 that allows developers to transfer source data from an arbitrary sized cell block to a destination cell block of the same size. This gives us a triggering type mechanism where we needed to jump through hoops in order to accomplish before.
I’ve attached a video and the example xlf source file which shows how to use the push button as a default/reset button.
If you have any additional examples that you would like to share, please post them on the comments section below.
Please download the source file here