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.

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