Xcelsius 2008 Dashboard Best Practices

by Abdulezer, Loren

• ISBN13: 9780672329951
• ISBN10: 0672329956
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-12-22
• Publisher: Sams Publishing

Summary

The definitive guide to designing and building interactive and intelligent dashboards using Xcelsius, the market leading dashboard software.

Author Biography

Loren Abdulezer is CEO and president of Evolving Technologies Corporation, a New York-based technology consulting firm that specializes in visual data analysis. He has a long-standing record in the Xcelsius community and has been a staunch proponent of the technology since its early days.

 

Loren is the editor-in-chief of Xcelsius Journal (www.XcelsiusJournal.com), an online magazine dedicated to users in the Xcelsius user community. Loren also started the website Xcelsius Best Practices (www.XcelsiusBestPractices.com). Loren is the author of Excel Best Practices for Business and Escape from Excel Hell. He served as the technical editor of Crystal Xcelsius For Dummies. He can be reached at [e-mail].

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Xcelsius 2008 Fundamentals

Motivation for Using Xcelsius 2008 11

Showcase of Xcelsius 2008 Dashboards 33

Getting Familiar with Xcelsius 2008 43

Embedded Spreadsheets: The Secret Sauce of Xcelsius 2008 69

Using Charts and Graphs to Represent Data 127

Single Value Components: Dials, Gauges, Speedometers, and the Like 157

Xcelsius 2008 Best Practices and Techniques

Using Multi-Layer Visibility in Your Dashboards and Visualizations 181

Managing Interactivity 203

Xcelsius and Statistics 229

Financial Analysis 257

Maps in Xcelsius 275

Smart Data and Alerts 297

Working with Less-Than-Optimal Data 315

Other Dashboard Techniques and Practices 337

Advanced Features

XML and Data Connectivity 353

Creating Custom Components for Fun and Profit 371

Appendices

Supported Spreadsheet Functions in Xcelsius 2008 401

Xcelsius Product Family Comparison 415

Xcelsius Best Practice Techniques and Hip Pocket Tips 425

Index 43

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Preface PrefaceA broad and growing community of professionals regularly prepares or needs to prepare dashboards and interactive visualizations and reports. Like many of those other professionals, I have used Excel to create useful reports and dashboards. The problem is that unless I incorporated extensive amounts of one-off code, Excel lacked some essential features that I was looking for: The ability to design a dashboard interface by dragging and dropping components on a canvas The ability to map visual components to a "live" spreadsheet built using my Excel modelsThe ability to deploy simple, self-contained dashboards that are suited for visual data analysis by ordinary usersThose capabilities existed in Xcelsius 3.0. Two product generations later, Xcelsius 2008 has undergone a metamorphosis; Xcelsius now includes a well-honed and highly integrated spreadsheet and dashboard design environment, significantly greater spreadsheet functionality, more visual components and interface options, a revamped and expanded framework for data connectivity, and the ability to create entirely new custom-designed components on equal footing with built-in components.This is great stuff. It sounds like everybody ought to be using Xcelsius 2008, for anything and everything. But Xcelsius 2008 isn't intended to be a jack-of-all-trades. First and foremost, Xcelsius 2008 is a serious tool for building interactive dashboards and intelligent visualizations. The secret to its power is how it is joined at the hip with spreadsheets.Xcelsius 2008 is remarkably easy to use. From a dashboard layout perspective, everything is point and click. You don't need much in the way of spreadsheet prowess to start doing interesting and useful things with Xcelsius. This quick bang for the buck is like kindling wood in a furnace: It's enough to get a flame started, but it won't heat up the room. To get a roaring and self-sustaining fire, you need to take things to the next level.So what is stopping you from building better dashboards? The biggest challenge holding most people back is lack of time. If you are busy worrying about monitoring and meeting production quotas, or allocating budgets among competing projects, you are probably not going to spend a lot of time improving on a dashboard design once you get it working. Maybe for an occasional dashboard, that's smart thinking. If your dashboard serves you well, you will no doubt use it to do more things. Who knows? Maybe you need to enable weekly or daily analysis in addition to monthly analysis.Say that you want to add a second product line, monitored by a dashboard. You start with your already working dashboard design as your template and add more features. As you keep cloning, you are stepping up your maintenance responsibilities and possibly bloating your dashboard. At some point not far down the road, the dashboard capabilities plateau. It is not nearly agile enough to keep up with changing requirements or expectations. This is where best practices come into play. I know that time is premium for you. It is for everyone. To save you valuable time, I have worked out a wealth of best practices and techniques so that you don't need to reinvent the wheel.In this book, I do a few other things: Introduce you to the features you need to know. I get you started with setting up your Xcelsius workspace. I introduce you to essential components and show you how to use them. I help you build up your spreadsheet skills i