I recently ran across an article called Obtaining the perfect Custom Color Scheme in Xcelsius from a blog called SAP ABAP4 Technology. I was hoping to elaborate on the actual blog post but was unable to add my comments, so if the author or anyone catches this post, it would be nice to place a link there...

The article addresses only half of the functionality available with custom color schemes. Within the color manager, there is an "Advanced" button that empowers you with more detailed control over specific component colors. If you spend time browsing the advanced section you can quickly modify all components within your dashboard by component category rather than using the basic color scheme adjustments.

The basic color scheme adjustment mode was thoughtfully implemented to affect over 1000 color dependencies using 10 base colors. The problem is that the Xcelsius user interface does not indicate what each of the 10 colors does. You can go to the advanced tab to see the relationships, or I have provided key below:

1. Text
2. Button color, chart backgrounds, component backgrounds, maps, scrollbars
3. Canvas Background, Axis colors
4. Background Components, Gridlines, Selector Mouse Over
5. Chart Series 1 color
6. Chart Series 2 color
7. Chart Series 3 color
8. Chart Series 4 color
9. Chart Series 5 color
10. Misc. Colors like selector gridlines and disabled items

In the beginning of the article, the author eludes to design principles aligned with Stephen Few's book. Unfortunately the example charts, while used to illustrate technical shortcomings, do not accurately portray real life use cases.

Quote: "Unfortunately, there is no way (that I know of) to default colors 6-10 to show up as something else. To modify these, you must go into the properties of the chart and manually adjust the color under the appearance tab."

The pie chart, specifically in this example would not be an appropriate visualization with 6-10 pie slices. Trying to extract accurate analysis of relative pie slice sizes is extremely difficult and better accomplished with a bar/column chart. From a technical standpoint, Xcelsius can does provide control of up to 12 series colors using the Advanced tab.

There are some very important points here that Xcelsius should address. The most important shortcoming of the custom color scheme window is the inability to export and share color schemes. This is something that the article did cover well.

Hopefully this helps set the record straight with this feature set in Xcelsius.

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

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.

Xcelsius 2008 features a robust color scheme management. Those of you who used the style creator in Xcelsius 4.5, you may have written off the Color Scheme builder, but I have found it extremely useful. It is quite obvious that the Xcelsius dev team put a lot of time and effort into making the global aesthetics management much more powerful with Xcelsius 2008. The one thing they did not provide is some type of indication of what the base colors do. Here is a reference to how changing the colors in the Color Scheme window will affect your dashboard. As you explore the Advanced Settings, changing the base colors will trickle down, and then you can have granular control over individual components. At the end of the day, I have found this to be a valuable time saver when developing multiple dashboards for the same customer.

1. Text Color
2. Default Button Colors, Chart Background Colors, Map Color
3. Canvas Color, Chart Axis Color
4. Background Component Color, Chart Gridlines Color, Mouse Over Color
5. Chart Series 1 Color, Single Value Marker Color, Active Selector Color
6. Chart Series 2 Color
7. Chart Series 3 Color
8. Chart Series 4 Color
9. Chart Series 5 Color
10. Disabled Items, Single Value Track Color

I have seen hundreds of dashboards that all look similar for 1 reason…People who use Xcelsius don’t want to spend a lot of time customizing the look and feel for their dashboard. So what happens when you assemble components on a screen and want your dashboard to take on a different look from the standard default Xcelsius look and feel?

Within Xcelsius there is a concept of skins, which simply changes the look and feel without effecting any functionality you have created within your dashboard. To change the skin, go to View>Change Skin. You are then presented with several skin names that will globally change how all components look. Note that there is a default color scheme for every skin, which can be changed manually or through Styles (View>Change Style.)

I will give a brief overview of each skin, and my personal opinion of how and when I use each one…

Aqua
Aqua is a skin that emulates the Apple skin used for web browsing and an older version of the operating system. Aqua uses a consistent blue color scheme, which people seem to like, but sometimes the gradients and visual effects can also be a little too much to visually digest. I like using this one sometimes because the out of the box backgrounds layer together nicely.

Aero
Aero is a aviator type of theme that shows the most when you look at the gauge component. The charts and components all have extra gradients and glare effects which may be a little over the top for some, but the default color scheme is vibrant and pleasing to the eye.

Elan
Elan is one of the original Xcelsius skins which use a somewhat monotone blue color scheme. I see Elan and Aero as similar skins, because there are limited out of the box backgrounds, and the graphs look similar.

Graphite
Graphite was released with version 4.5 and has a nice collection of backgrounds that can be mixed and matched. While the default colors are dark, the skin itself has nice looking charts. The only problem I find with this skin is some of the transparency for dropdown components.

Halo
Halo is by far my personal favorite simply because it does not have all of the gradients featured in the other skins. I am a minimalist at heart, so this is as close as I get with Xcelsius, but still gives some depth within the selector controls. Most people hate the default lime green color but, once I change that, it always looks clean.