David Lai's Business Intelligence Blog

Thanks for attending the Toronto BusinessObjects Customer Exchange!

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...

Upgrading to an SSD with Paragon Migrate OS to SSD 2.0

I apologize if this is off topic but I felt that this was something was worth sharing with everyone. So this weekend I decided to buy a Solid State Drive (Corsair F115) as I was interested in speeding up my system. The only problem here was that Solid State Drives are much smaller than the traditional hard drive.  Thus the task was to migrate only the OS partition to the Solid State Drive.  My system...

Using Charles to help you debug!

In this article I would like to state the importance of how useful it is to use a traffic monitoring tool such as Charles or Fiddler when debugging connection type errors. In this example, we’ll go through a quick scenario on solving a crossdomain.xml related issue. You will need to Install Charles on your machine and install the Charles addon for Firefox. (more…)

Embedded Charts inside an Xcelsius Spreadsheet Table

One of the important features that Xcelsius lacks right now is to be able to embed charts in a table. This is a very powerful feature as we are able to present a lot of meaningful information with little real estate when embedding charts inside a table as shown. Embedded Bar Chart in Table (more…)

SAP Crystal Dashboard and Presentation Design (Xcelsius) Cookbook Coming Soon!

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...

Trick to synchronize the hovering/selection of multiple scorecards

Recently for one of my clients, I had to figure out a way to synchronize the selection of multiple scorecard components. The tables needed to be separated but at the same time we needed to make sure that when hover over a row on one table, that the other tables would have the same row highlighted. The easiest way to accomplish this is to have a separator column to separate each table, and then overlay...

Help make Xcelsius a better tool!

With your input and ideas we can all help Xcelsius become a better Dashboarding tool. Please take some time and visit the link below to submit your ideas that you think will make Xcelsius a better Dashboarding product. Thanks! https://ideas.sap.com/community/products_and_solutions/sbodashboards

Planned SAP name changes for Business Objects 4.0

Below is a great article on planned SAP named changes for the Business Objects 4.0 release. It looks like Xcelsius Enterprise will be changed to SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.   In my opinion it’s still better than SAP Crystal Dashboard Design, as that name is Soooo long! Bad thing is that the new change will add some more confusion.  Can’t we just keep the same name to make things...

Xcelisius Dashboards outside of Infoview with the help of CELogonToken

Not all corporations want their employees to access dashboards through Infoview as some may want to access dashboards through a 3rd party website or portal such as Sharepoint. On top of that, users generally don’t want a login pop-up to appear whenever dashboard data is first refreshed. So we’ll need some sort of hidden login mechanism that bypasses the pop-up and allows data to be refreshed on...