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Article 023 - Xcelsius 2008 Tree Maps and other features |
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Written by Loren Abdulezer
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Page 1 of 4
Xcelsius 2008 extends Crystal Xcelsius in what you can do and how you go about building dashboards and visualizations. This article previews with a couple of its new features. One of them relates to improved integration between Excel and Xcelsius. The other showcases the Tree Map component.
Overview
A rather remarkable feature of Xcelsius is its ability to embed a spreadsheet within a dashboard, thereby endowing or really turbocharging dashboards with industrial strength spreadsheet capabilities. The idea is at once simple; take a spreadsheet with data and formula, import it into the Xcelsius Designer environment keeping all its formulas intact. Drag and drop visual components onto a dashboard canvas and bind the attributes of these components to cells in the underlying spreadsheet. Then press an export button to produce a fully interactive dashboard in the file format of your choice, be it a PowerPoint slide, a Word document, a PDF file, or a Flash file for viewing over the web or from your browser. What's more, the visualizations made with Xcelsius keep the spreadsheet formulas live and intact. This is an absolutely wonderful metaphor for bringing data in rows and columns to interactive visualizations. The critics would charge that the metaphor of importing spreadsheets to the dashboard environment doesn't go far enough. The critic are right.
The critics would charge that the metaphor of importing spreadsheets to the dashboard environment doesn't go far enough. The critic are right. 
Crystal Xcelsius allows for the importing (and re-importing) of spreadsheets. While you could make changes to the underlyiing spreadsheet, you have to do it outside Xcelsius. Then you must re-import the spreadsheet. Should spreadsheet cells be repositioned by say, adding or deleting some rows or columns, the binding to the spreadsheet from the Xcelsius components may need to be remapped. This has surely caused grief and consternation to many a dashboard designer. Wouldn't it be nice to not have to work with your Excel spreadsheets in a detached mode when building your Xcelsius dashboards? The good news is now you can!
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 12 March 2008 )
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