With only a few chart types to choose from, we often have to get creative to achieve the desired results. In this case, a customer required an ability to view actual to target. I decided to use a technique for overlaying charts, but with a bit of a twist. Instead of showing actual vs target, I would create a dynamic popup that would show only the target for a bar that I have selected. Below is a quick rundown of what I did to each chart to get the shown result. The two most important parts for overlaid charts to work is that the X and Y Axis align perfectly, and the Y Axis max values are the same. If you look at both chart’s bindings you will see how easy it is to create this effect.

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Background Chart (Alerts Chart

General
Link data to data in column C

Behavior
Set manual scale and bind to C5

Drill Down
Enable Drilldown
Use Position and insert into C5
Drill down update behavior to on “Mouse Over”

Appearance>Layout
Hide Background
Hide Gridlines

Foreground Chart (Dynamic Plan Chart)

General
Link data to data in column E

Behavior
Set manual scale and bind to C5

Appearance>Series
Make the bar width to 5

Appearance>Layout
Hide Background
Hide Gridlines

Here is a nice trick for providing a pre-loader to your dashboard using the tools available to you inside Xcelsius. Many times when your dashboards get large in size, end users can experience latency before anything shows up on the screen. This is because the Flash player downloads the entire SWF to your system before initializing. To avoid end users seeing a blank white screen, you can use Xcelsius to provide a pre-loader using the Slideshow component. It sure would be nice to see this as built in functionality….

**Since I wrote this aricle, it looks like the Xcelsius development team granted my wish…Xcelsius 2008 now features a “Loading” screen as default functionality for Xcelsius generated SWFs.

1. In Xcelsius, get the size of your canvas by clicking on File>Document Properties
2. Open a new Xcelsius project and set the canvas size to the same dimensions as your original dashboard.
3. In the components window, navigate to the Web Connectivity folder and insert an External Slideshow component.
4. Stretch the slideshow to the edges of the canvas, so they are the same size.

5. Enter the relative or absolute URL for your dashboard into the properties sheet. (XYZ.swf)
   For Business Objects Enterprise users, you will enter the following syntax:

   documentDownload?iDocID=10348&sKind=Flash

   Go to File>Font>Unicode Font Options and check Use Non-Embedded Fonts. This will lighten the SWF size by 65K or so.

6. Export your new pre-loader SWF.
7. Now you will direct your users to the pre-loader SWF.

Here is the source file showing you how to accomplish this.
Download the Source Files