In my day to day discussions with other consultants and customers who use Xcelsius, I have experienced common issues that you may find when building Xcelsius dashboards. While I often work within the constraints of the product I beat up Xcelsius pretty good and have found a suitable system configuration for building dashboards. I wanted to share my configuration and practices in hopes that you may be able to improve your dashboard building experience.

Troubleshooting an issue with Xcelsius can be a bit of a moving target with different versions and hot fixes of Windows, Excel, Flash player, and of course Xcelsius. Here is how my system is currently configured:

PC- Sony Vio Laptop
Dual core Pentium with 3GB RAM.
Windows Vista
Office 2007
Xcelsius 2008 Enterprise SP1 Hotfix2
Flash Player 10

If I could have it my way, I would still run windows XP with Office 2003. Windows XP consumes less memory and in my experience, Office 2003 also seems to be a lot more stable.

Design Time with Xcelsius Best Practices
As you launch Xcelsius, the following practices should be taken into account to set you up for success.

• Do not run Excel while using Xcelsius. I have both 2007 and 2003 on my system, so if I need to get into Excel while using Xcelsius, I only use 2003.
• Run 1 instance of Xcelsius at a time. If you need to copy and paste components between Xcelsius instances do so and then close the second instance of Xcelsius.
• If you need to copy data from an old Excel spreadsheet, paste into wordpad first and then Xcelsius. It adds an extra step but goes much smoother than trying to get data from Excel into Xcelsius
• If Xcelsius crashes for whatever reason, open the task manager CTR + ALT + DELETE and shot down any Excel processes before re-starting Xcelsius.
• Turn Excel auto save off while working heavily inside Xcelsius. In Excel 2003, this is located in Tools>Options>Save. In Excel 2007 this is located under Excel Options.
• Shut down all Excel add-ins or any other applications that may use Excel or Office.
• Save and version your dashboards every time you make major changes. It never hurts to have extra versions sitting around.
• Don’t develop dashboards on Xcelsius running on Windows Server. I don’t believe that it is supported and does not work very well for heavy development.

If you have other contributions to this list feel free to add them in the comments section.

Here is the situation…You build your Excel logic, import into Xcelsius, bind all of your components, hit Preview for the instant gratification Xcelsius brings, and your model does not work right. With many dependencies between Xcelsius component bindings and underlying Excel logic, it could be a nightmare to reverse engineer your model just to find that a VLOOKUP is formatted wrong, or your combo box is inserting into the wrong cell.

Here is a little trick of the trade for troubleshooting your model using a feature inside of Xcelsius called snapshot. When you hit preview, navigate to the portion of your dashboard where your error occurs. While in preview mode go to File>Snapshot>Back to Excel. You will then name your Excel file (do not overwrite your original) and save it to your local hard drive. This Excel file will show the state of your model at the given point in time while you were in preview mode. This means all of your insert-in rows, logic, connectors, etc will have executed, and the Excel snapshot will show you what the underlying spreadsheet looks like. Since you should know your spreadsheet, you can quickly look to see if you inserted into an incorrect cell (this is where color coding would have saved you time), or if a formula is generating an error.
As you may or may not know, when you are using Xcelsius you are binding to a copy of your original spreadsheet that you imported. In other words, your XLF is a combination of Xcelsius configured components and your imported spreadsheet snapshot. This is why making changes to the original XLS will not be reflected in your XLF automatically.
Hope this helps!