Altek Solutions Business Intelligence Blog

Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius 2008): Tips and Tricks ep3: Automatically Moving your Tab Set

Sorry we missed our normal Tuesday blog post. I have been really busy finishing off a project and getting ready for a 3 week engagement that starts next Tuesday. So I figured that a short post was better than no post at all.

Another question was put up on the BOB Forum asking if it was possible to automatically move from tab to tab on an interval. A couple options were thrown out there before mine (all valid options) and I decided that I wanted to go the route and try to keep the functionality all inside of Xcelsius instead of trying to constantly pull data in from a data source. After about 30 minutes I was able to do this with 2 history components and a tab set.

Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius 2008) Tips and Tricks ep2: Automatically Closing Your Calendar Control

Welcome to episode 2 of our Tips and Tricks for Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius 2008). This post is going to be a short one but should help in making your dashboard stand out among the rest. Ever since I started working with Xcelsius 4.5, I had clients wanting functionality built into their dashboards that just wasn’t feasible with the standard out of the box components. One of the biggest request was to take the calendar control and to make it so that they didn’t have to click the toggle button to open the calendar, click the date and then click the toggle button to close the calendar. Too many clicks in the end users eyes. So with every new fix pack / service pack for Xcelsius, I have tried to build the functionality that will allow the end user to click a date and have the calendar disappear. With the addition of the push button, we are now able to do this.

Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius 2008) Tips and Tricks ep1: Adding a Select All to your Selector

I build and design dashboards pretty much on a daily basis whether it be for a client, POC, or as demo material. One of the biggest things that I dread to hear, is my boss saying either one of these phrases: “How hard would it be….” or “You know what would be cool?” This usually means that I will have to put on my thinking cap and figure out how to pull something off in Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius). TANGENT: Before I go any further, I am going to say that the renaming of Xcelsius to Crystal Dashboard Design has not really sunk in with me, so I apologize for switching back and forth in advance. Anyways, as I was saying, I have to pull off some pretty interesting things relatively often so I thought why not share these Tips and Tricks with everyone who follows our blog. This will be the first entry in a line of many that will pick out a little pieces of functionality that I have built using standard components inside Crystal Dashboard Design and using QaaWS or Live Office. Topic number one is allowing your dashboard to select All of the entries in a selector.

Underwhelm Your Users with a Well-designed Dashboard

Dashboard and visualizations are a hot topic right now. You can’t go to an SAP BusinessObjects event or a user group meeting without seeing over half of the presentations focusing on dashboards and visualizations. And, like with any cutting-edge technology, it seems everyone is trying to get in on the action. While that’s a good thing, sometimes people lack the basic knowledge and skills to utilize those tools to deliver effective analysis.

Xcelsius … Crystal Dashboard Design … Xcelsius 2008 Fix Pack 3.2 Now Available!

SAP BusinessObjects has released another fix pack for the newly named Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius 2008). Fix Pack 3.2 is now available for download out on SAP’s Service Marketplace and can be found under the Business Objects Download page through the following path: SAP BusinessObjects Support Software and Corrections > SBOP Dashboard Design Enterprise > BOBJ Xcelsius Enterprise 2008. The Release notes and Fixed Issues documentation can be found in the links below.

SCN Winter Olympic Challenge

A little over a month on my Google Reader, I got an RSS Feed from the Business Object SAP Developer Network about an Xcelsius Challenge. The blog was put out by Jason Cao of SAP BusinessObjects and the challenge was to use community poll results in Xcelsius 2008 to showcase a developer’s skills. Not really interested, I marked it as read and moved along with my morning ritual of checking the happenings of the world. Later on in the day we had a company meeting to discuss upcoming projects and ideas for a new marketing campaign. One of the topics led us to chatting about creating some new demo dashboards for our website. This is when a light bulb went off in my head and I brought the challenge to the table. Long story short, the boss man thought it was a great idea and an easy way to get a demo dashboard done and put our name out on the SAP Community Network.

Making Your Measures Behave

Defining measures gets interesting because while they are tied to a high-level corporate goal, they also touch nearly every other aspect of the organization, making it a challenge sometimes to balance all of the competing interests. Plus, as soon as you start converting their behavior into numbers, people will simple adapt their behavior to have good numbers and may not deliver the overall results you had hoped.

How to Alienate 12% of your Audience Without Even Trying

I’m color-blind. I can see colors, just not the same way the majority of you do. I didn’t write this post to complain about my color-blindness. Rather, now that dashboards and data visualization continue to become more wide-spread, we’ve got a few issues to talk about.

How to Implement the Xcelsius Publishing Plugin

After viewing multiple posts on BOB about the subject and having a couple of questions directed towards me about this, I decided it would be an excellent blog topic for everyone that has a need for this solution. Check out the steps below to implement the Xcelsius Publishing Plugin.

Using QaaWS to drive your Xcelsius Dashboards

Keeping right in line with the other blogs that I have written about QaaWS (What is a QaaWS and Quick and Dirty Guide to Creating a QaaWS) I decided to put together a quick one and a dashboard to show how to leverage your Business Objects Universe to fuel your Xcelsius Dashboards.