Book Release- Creating Dashboards with Xcelsius

Posted on September 18, 2010 by

Co-written by my colleague and resident Flexcelsius Guru, Evan Delodder’s book “Creating Dashboards with Xcelsius — Practical Guide” is now available for purchase. You can now learn not only how to use Xcelsius, but also introduce yourself to the Xcelsius SDK through Evan’s experiences developing Centigon Solutions products like GMaps Plugin.

If you want to learn from Evan through live instruction, you can join him for the Flexcelsius Bootcamp Nov 3-4 in San Diego, CA.

Click here to learn more

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Widgets | 1 Comment

Upgrade your Flash Player to fix blank PPT slides

Posted on September 14, 2010 by

Here are instructions to upgrade to the latest version of Flash Player, which resolves Xcelsius not rendering in PPT. Please use or forward these specific instructions to minimize any further troubleshooting:

1. Open Internet Explorer.
Upgrading Flash Player in Firefox or Chrome will NOT resolve your issue. Using IE, will upgrade the ActiveX version of Flash Player used by PowerPoint.

2. Check to ensure you have Flash Player 10,1,82,76 or later by clicking on the following link:
http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

3. If you have an earlier version, with IE, download the latest Flash Player :
http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Xcelsius | 3 Comments

Xcelsius Flashback to 2005

Posted on September 9, 2010 by

Have you ever gone back to old dashboard designs and picked out areas where you went wrong?

This week, I was working on a sales pipeline demo dashboard for a client, and the specifications included a screenshot of a demo that I built a long time ago. When I opened my archive I found the original source files dated September 2005, that was later re-branded when BOBJ purchased Xcelsius (see screenshot below).

The original dashboard was for Salesforce.com, which in 2005 was making major moves in the marketplace to become the leading software as a service CRM today. The good news is a dashboard design that I built more than five years ago still holds, water. The bad news is at there were multiple elements that were poorly chosen, so I replaced them for my latest iteration of this dashboard.

The first few things to go were my stacked bar chart. This is an inappropriate use of a stacked bar chart because it requires too much mental juggling not only to match the rainbow of colors to a key, but also to figure out the relative $ figures. Instead, I replaced it with a simple bar chart, which is significantly easier to read.

The next item to go was the gauges on the right hand side, now replaced with 3 bullet charts that not only communicate these values better, but also give me a good representation of the actual/target. With that, I now used half of the right bar, so I placed a sparkline showing the closed/won opportunitiy history for a rolling 12 months. Now instead of displaying 3 data points, I have hundreds using the same real estate.

The dashboard should be done in a few weeks, so I will see if I can get permission from the client to post it.

Let me know if there are bad practices that you used to implement that you now stay away from these days.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Component Best Practices, Xcelsius | 20 Comments

NFL Football Personal Pool Manager

Posted on September 6, 2010 by

It is football season for us here in the states, and for my network of friends and colleagues this will lock down every Sunday for the next 17 weeks. Though I don’t have the capacity to participate in fantasy football, my friends have long contributed to a football pool where we pick the winners for each week and put some money on the line to make it interesting. Our biggest problem was the manual process for gathering picks, and my unwillingness to pay for such as software solution.

Instead, I rolled up my sleeves built a very simple Xcelsius tool capable of capturing and exporting my weekly picks using the latest CSV Connector component. Like any dashboard, project once the end users gets a taste for what is possible with Xcelsius the real requirements begin to pour in. Somewhere in the middle, I ended up with what I am calling my NFL Personal Football Pool Manager (shown below).

NFL Pool Picker
TRY NOW

The idea is simple:
1. Load and navigate the 17 week schedule one week at a time
2. Capture the user’s picks for the winner of each game
3. Save the picks so they can be recalled throughout the entire season
4. Allow a user to export the picks for any week
5. Load the scores and compare the results to the picks
6. Display the results for each week
7. Don’t allow anyone to cheat!!

If you have your own football pool and want to track your picks, or want to have your entire group use this, I offer it online free of charge. Based on the usage, we may decide to take this several steps further to increase the value. Your feedback and ideas are always appreciated!

View NFL Football Personal Pool Manager

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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Posted in Xcelsius | 1 Comment

Reportapalooza- Last day to vote on the first round of dashboards

Posted on September 3, 2010 by

Monster sightings, coffee consumption, sports statistics, and internet usage, instrument buying habits…. These are the subjects for the first wave of submissions from SAP’s Reportapalooza.

This event squares off some of our technology / community thought leaders for Crystal Reports and Xcelsius through a series of challenges. The first challenge was a dashboard bake-off, where experts were given a short period of time to transform a fun subject matter into an interesting dashboard dashboard. The emphasis is clearly on cool factor as all contestants provided their design flare and Xcelsius wizardry. I am extremely impressed with how each contestant introduced their subject in a unique visual interface.

One of my favorites is the Coffee Consumption tool created by my colleague Miko Yuk from EverythingXcelsius, uses a basic form approach to collect user information while providing statistical coffee consumption facts. The payoff at the end is a plain text analysis of your coffee drinking habits. Mico also made very good use of GMaps Plugin showing regional and location based analysis.
Coffee Consumption Dashboard

Another cool idea is a monster sightings dashboard by Jamie Oswald where you can tweet submissions and then view your tweet inside of GMaps Plugin.
Moster Sightings

Jim Brogden also leveraged GMaps Plugin to display community bands using addresses across the United States. There is a log of interesting statistical factoids in here worth digging into.

I absolutely love what all of the designers implemented as each dashboard provides unique information illustrating how flexible Xcelsius is from a design standpoint. I apologize for not covering them all in detail, but I highly recommend that you check all of the dashboards out to get great ideas for your dashboard projects.

I like that we have something that is fun to look at with Reportapalooza and look forward to reporting on the next challenge!

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

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