“Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful”. That’s how the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett makes money. In the midst of economic crisis, most of you who maintain a portfolio or want to take advantage of the drop in points by buying stocks, there might be a question at the back of your mind: “What was the stock price of WXYZ on 25th October 2005?”. There are many websites which you can use to look up historical stock quotes. The best of all is the Yahoo!Financehistorical stock quote search, found at their stock research center page.
Although not that frequent with Xeclsius 2008, this error is still bothering some Xcelsius 4.5 users. Excel Add-Ins might be a possible cause for this issue. Add-In files might launch multiple instances of Excel which might be conflicting with Xcelsius. Before deleting the Add-In XLA files or fiddling with the registry, I would recommend you to do the following:
Kill all Excel processes from the task manager
Restart the machine and try launching Xcelsius
Reinstall Xcelsius
Reinstall MS Office
If none of the above works try the following:
Please look in the following folder if any files exist: Go to C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOFFICE11XLSTART.
Follow the instructions in the Microsoft KB 110076 to removing add-ins files.
If the above does not work:
Click Start , click Run, type “regedit”.
Go to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREClassesInterface.
Click Edit > New > Key and type “{0000000c- 0000-0000-C000-0000-00000046}”.
Click Edit > New > String Value and type “IStream”.
Click Edit > New > Key and type “NumMethods”.
Click Edit > New > String Value and type “14”.
Click Edit > New > Key and type “ProxyStubClsid32”.
Click Edit > New > String Value and type “{00000320-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}”
NOTE: The IStream interface is a fundamental Windows facility for saving/loading files.
A simple way to show trends for specific Metrics or KPIs is to display an arrow or a color combination. Xcelsius Trend component does both in one go. Below is an interactive xcelsius swf model which displays the trends of a metric for four regions. The dashboard is interactive, enter the target value and change the individual regions metric values to see the trend icon change accordingly.
Xcelsius trend icon component can be binded to a single cell only. You can assign colors based on whether the cell value is positive, negative or zero. You need to be a little creative in order to change the values of the binded cell to positive, negative or zero based on the individual metric value.
For example, the target is set to 100, and the East region’s value is 65. If high values are good for the metric which we are considering in this example, then the trend icon should show a down arrow with red color. In order to do this I had written a simple IF formula in the cell which is binded to the trend icon, so that it displays (-1) if the east value is less than target, 0 if it is equal and 1 if it is higher.
Feel free to try with different combinations. You can change the Values of individual regions and the target.
If you are one of those people who follow the presidential elections closely, then this one is for you. In one of my recent posts on 2008 Electoral College Calculator using Crystal Xcelsius, I developed a tool to predict the next president of the United States. The user can click on the individual states and choose the party they think could win the state. Based on the click, the tool automatically counts and adds the total number of electoral seats won by the respective candidates. I developed this tool based on the Wall Street Jounal Electoral College Calculator. Since then I was reading a lot of predictions made by the experts and the National media. As I write this post, the prediction by majority of the news networks is that Barack Obama is leading by 8 points over his Republican Counterpart John McCain. Out of curiosity, I ran a search on Electoral Maps and I was surprised to see that there are so many electoral maps out there on the web by possibly every news media group. I consolidated some of the best Electoral Maps.
Note: Click on the Images for the interactive models.
This Webinar was recorded on June 18th, 2008. The presentation focuses on the available dashboarding tools from Business Objects. If there is anyone out there with a Business Objects shop and unsure which dashboarding tool to use and also have a hard time determining which dashboard deployment is best suited to meet your specific business needs, then this webinar is for you. You will also hear about some of the key differences between Dashboard Builder and Xcelsius, enabling you to make the right decision for your dashboard deployment.
The Takeaways:
The current dashboard strategy for BusinessObjects XI 3.0
How the dashboard strategy has changed from previous versions
Four dashboard options available with XI 3.0 and different use cases for your dashboard deployment
How to select the dashboard scenario that best satisfies company’s objectives
