David Lai's Business Intelligence Blog

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...

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...

SAP InsideTrack 2010 Vancouver Dashboard Essentials

I look forward to seeing everyone at Vancouver’s very first local SAP Inside Track Wednesday Sept 15, 2010! I’ve been given the great opportunity to represent Xcelsius Gurus Network and present on SAP Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius). I’ll be presenting the following topics and have a thorough Questions and Answer period. Why are dashboards used and what are the benefits? Dashboard...

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...

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...

Xcelsius Canvas Container

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...

Xcelsius 2008 advanced workshop

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...

Inovista Microcharts part 2

In my previous article I gave an overview of the Microcharts plug-in for Xcelsius and a quick example of creating a Microcharts Datatable. In addition, I explained how to replicate the same example in Xcelsius using workarounds that would make development much more timely and harder to maintain. In this article I would like to talk about some important features that Inovista Microcharts has that Xcelsius...