Xcelsius Journal

In recent months I've been hard at work on a new book called Xcelsius 2008 Dashboard Best Practices, to be published by Business Objects Press. I owe my readers a sneak peek of what's to come. 

Overview

Dashboards are powerful tools that are at the same time, both overrated and underrated. Some dashboards are very slick, and they can give a false impression that all you need to do is design an interface, feed in some data, and presto; you've got your dashboard. That only works after you carefully think through how to capture your data, assemble and validate it, structure it the way you need, critically assess how to represent information visually, and get a clear sense of how dashboard users will want to interact with it.

Xcelsius dashboards are particularly intriguing because they incorporate embedded spreadsheets. There are two levels which this can immediately put to use. At one level you have the ability to make use of on-the-fly calculations that wouldn't be practical to prepare in advance. The other is to empower dashboard users by empowering the user interface using the embedded spreadsheet.

Runtime Computations in a Dashboard 

Consider displaying a chart showing a timeline of recorded values and their moving average (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Automatically Computing the Moving Average based on starting day in chart and interval

The moving average is calculated on the spot, based on the moving average period set by the dashboard user who clicks the up/down arrows on a Spinner Button. The dashboard user can easily advance to any point in time using a second Spinner Button. Try this for yourself in the following interactive dashboard.

Notice that as you adjust the number of days for the moving avarage period, the moving average curve smoothes out on intervals of 7, 14, 21, and 28 days. This is because there is a natural weekly cycle. If you move to any point in the timeline, you can easily spot the weekends, as there is a sudden dip in activity.

The whole idea of the dashboard is to empower the user by giving him or her the ability to the visualization where ever it needs to go.

The whole idea of the dashboard is to empower the user by giving him or her the ability to the visualization where ever it needs to go.