In all my Dashboarding projects, I always try to use as less number of components as possible and also try to make the components do most of the work rather than using complex Excel formulae. However, due to tool limitations, this is not always possible. One such example is to use a single label (text) component and to make it float around the canvas based on the mouse input/position from the user. Starting Dashboards SP05, this is possible.
Happy New Year!!!
I know, I know. I’ve been very lazy off late and it’s been a while I posted something meaningful. I do have some excuses though. There has been a lot of activity in both my personal and professional lives. As some of you know I’ve joined the mother ship (SAP) which kept me busy for most of the time and from the picture, you all must have figured by now who kept me busy the remaining time. By the way, he is still keeping me busy. We named him Arjun and he is big trouble.
Anyways, enough of the lame excuses. Why did I decide to write again? A few of my sane friends pumped some blogging sense into me to re-crank the blog up and start writing again and over the past year, I worked on a variety of interesting projects using SAP Dashboards and other interesting tools. I’ve gathered great deal of content during this time and in the subsequent posts, I would like to share all those experiences and tips & tricks with you.
There has been a lot of changes on the product life cycle and the future road map of Xcelsius (now known as SAP Dashboards). I will be covering all that stuff in the upcoming posts. So stay tuned and if possible subscribe via Email so that you don’t miss out on the exciting stuff that is coming up.
[Exclusive Invite] #1 Dashboard Training by my friends!
I know I’ve been a bit out of pocket as things have been very hectic the last few months!, so forgive me!
…and while I seldom do endorsements…
If you have not heard about it yet, my good friend Mico Yuk has teamed up with my fellow Xcelsius Gurus Ryan Goodman and Donald McCormick to launch a new online Dashboard training series named the ‘BI Dashboard Formula’.
I truly feel this type of real world training is missing in the BI market and I suggest that you check it out to before it sells out.
BIDF (as its called) is simple 7-step process, that has been used by the Xcelsius Gurus to successfully implement over 500+ enterprise dashboard worldwide. For the first time their going to unveil and teach you the ENTIRE process.
I personally know Mico, and I can tell you this is the real deal and you’ll be disappointed if you miss out.
Click here to check it out for yourself before the $500 discount registration ends on July 31st, 2012.
Cheers,
Kalyan Verma
P.S. – Don’t forget to also download their FREE Dashboard Planning Guide!
SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4 Cookbook Giveaway!
I’m very proud to announce that SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards Cookbook is officially available. For the past year, Xavier Hacking and I together with Packt Publishing have carefully compiled over 90 recipes on transforming your data into highly effective dashboards.
We cover the ins and outs of using the Dashboard Design components, connecting to different data sources, as well as providing examples on how to use many of the top Xcelsius Addons. Each recipe contains easy to follow step by step instructions and screenshots on accomplishing each task. In addition, XLF example source files are also included for every recipe to make sure users are following the recipes correctly.
To kick things off, we are having a Twitter contest where we will be randomly drawing 2 winners on Monday July 25, 2011
To join all you need to do is send out a tweet with a link to the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards Cookbook page.
The easiest way is to tweet by clicking on this link! or you can use the share buttons from the PacktPub SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards Cookbook page
Retweeting other tweets is also allowed and there are no limits to how many tweets you can tweet!
Good luck everyone!
Xcelsius 2008 SP4 Spreadsheet Alerts!
I was quite impressed with the new features released in Xcelsius 2008 SP4, especially with the new spreadsheet alerts capability. I keep asking myself, why didn’t we have this feature when they came out with the scorecard component? 🙂
Before the advent of the scorecard selector component, it was a pain to create a scorecard as you had to overlay label alerts on top of a spreadsheet table to get the traffic lighting to work. The other alternative was to use a third party addon component such as Inovista Microcharts.
When the scorecard component was added in Xcelsius 2008 SP3, it saved developers a ton of time and effort when creating scorecards for a dashboard. However, it lacked some important features that existed in the spreadsheet table component.
In this article I will write about what is available in the spreadsheet table component that is not available in the scorecard component and vice versa. Perhaps someone from SAP will see this article and glue together the missing pieces.
