This week, Centigon Solutions Inc. released a collection of plug-in components for Xcelsius 2008. Though I am biased because of my involvement with Centigon Solutions, as an Xcelsius power user, I can’t imagine building dashboards without these components. Here is my analysis based on extensive use of these components. I will write a few articles illustrating how to get maximum utility from these components and how I have utilized them. For more information about the Centigon Solutions components, visit:

Xcelsius Add Ons Components

Dynamic Sort: My Excel sort workaround was one of the most downloaded templates and still was an ugly workaround to ranking data. The Dynamic Sort component provides the sorting/ranking capabilities we have longed for and does it extremely well. Every dashboard I build has required some level of ranking and sorting and now we can do it on the fly inside of the SWF.

Background Builder: Most of you do not have the luxury of working with a graphic designer for each dashboard project you produce, leaving you with the standard out of the box backgrounds that come with Xcelsius. While these are clean, we always want more. Background builder is a single component packaged with over 20 designs and textures that can be configured with detailed appearance properties. Bevel and drop-shadow properties are two of the many properties that allow for complete control over your design with little work. Now for most dashboards, I don’t need my graphic designer to produce great looking results.

Reverse Selector: This component is a simple solution to a long lasting problem that never had a workaround: We needed a way to re-use single value components, and input text components to control multiple cells. In the countless calculator applications that I have constructed, I always end up stacking many sliders on top of each other to get the same results, which takes for ever to setup, and limits the possibilities for complex calculators. Reverse selector fills this gap by introducing a new concept that literally works like a reverse selector. This new component evaluates 1 single cell, and inserts into multiple cells within a range based on an index/position number.

GMaps Plugin Beta: This is a great start to what will be an amazing addition to the Xcelsius product. This component is in the infancy stages as a completed component. Even as a beta, this component offers capabilities not possible with other mapping solutions for Xcelsius.

Click here to view these add ons for Xcelsius

Thank you all for the comments and questions. I apologize for the lack of articles lately. I have been working on new projects, and recently finished contributing a few Xcelsius chapters for an upcoming book. I am completely backlogged with emails from the blog, so if I will probably sit down and catch up in the next week or so.

Lots of new and exciting stuff coming down the pipe in the next few weeks so check back soon!

Xcelsius 2008 supports several new image formats using the image component. For those of you who are not familiar with the image component, it is located in Art and Backgrounds and provides the ability to import and embed your own artwork or logos.

Xcelsius 2008 supports new image formats including JPG, GIF, PNG and BMP. Here are a few basic tips to choose the correct image format...

You want to gravitate toward JPG and GIF rather than BMP because they are compressed formats that will not bloat the size of your SWF. PNG is nice because you can create images with transparent backgrounds that look much nicer than GIF files. The problem with the Xcelsius image component is that GIF and PNG transparency does not work, meaning you still get a white border around your images.

If your artwork originates as a vector image, you may want to import that into Flash and create a SWF. If you are trying to import your logo, you may want to check with you marketing department to see if they can export it to a SWF. Adobe Illustrator has an export to SWF option which will give you the cleanest looking logo.

As the gas prices at the pump increase, I wanted to see just how much we are paying for gas here in California compared to the rest of the country. To do this, I utilized Xcelsius 2008 to build a dashboard not only to help make information easier to consume, but also to showcase a sample/viral dashboard for my blog.

The resulting dishoard exemplifies the benefits of using interactive data visualization compared to static HTML tables/reports. At a glance, I can quickly asses what I am paying at the pump in relation to the national average and state averages.

Just showing the data wasn't good enough...I wanted to provide additional analysis to transform the $/gallon data into something meaningful. A simple calculator was added to illustrate what we will pay per month and year, given the current price.

View full size example

All data for this dashboard originates from AAA.com. I am not providing source files for this dashboard at this time, but if you have any questions about what I have done, please add them to the comments in this post. If you are interested in using this dashboard in your web site for non-profit, please contact me.

I have several people point out that the gauges are distracting, which is absolutely correct. I have reverted back to the original graph version that can be viewed here:
View Gas Price Dashboard v0.9

I recently worked on a project with Xcelsius 2008 where we used the XML maps connectivity option load data into a dashboard. I have used this feature for a long time in Xcelsius 4.5, but found some challenges that I had to work through so I will share them with you below.

• If you are using Excel 2003, by default you can not get access to the XML maps dialogue. You have two options: Do your XML maps in Excel, and import into Xcelsius, or insert the XML Source menu item. To get the XML Source menu button, right click in your Excel toolbar and click Customize and navigate to the Commands tab. Select Data, and scroll down to the XML Data source option. You will click and drag the XML Source button into your toolbar.

• If you are using Excel 2007, you will need to enable the Developer tab within your toolbar/ribbon. To do this, open Excel 2007 outside of Xcelsius, click on the Office icon (the round button in the upper left corner), and select Excel Options. In the first tab you will see a tab labeled "Show Developer tab in the Ribbon." Check this box and you will now have access to the XML source option, within Xcelsius. From there, the process for configuring XML maps is the same in both Excel 2003 and 2007.

• If you use XML maps inside of Xcelsius, I found some odd behaviors when I try to re-import XML maps. I have not yet pinpointed the cause, but I found that if I re-bound my XML maps after changing the XML structure slightly, that items were miss-matched. The result was me having to create a new Excel tab and re-importing my XML maps there. That said, I would recommend having a separate tab for each XML map source you import.

• Make sure the application server containing your XML file or script has a cross domain policy file. If the XML source is on your desktop PC, you shouldn't have any problems.

Hopefully these tips will get you going in the right direction. If you have any experiences with this feature, please post them as a comment and we can add them to this best practices sheet. Thanks.