Listing of reprint Articles
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Building Help Systems in your Crystal Xcelsius Visualizations
When you design a dashboard or visualization, you know all its hidden features. But when you distribute it to others, will your target audience immediately know how to use it?
Incorporting a help system in your software addresses these issues, but does so at a price. All too often, help systems come in as an afterthought and are difficult to manage because they are typically separate systems grafted on to an already existing and relatively complete system. Fortunately, there are some good techniques to deal with these challenges.
This article explains how to create a simple but effective help facility in your visualizations.
Click on the links for:
Article020HelpSystem.swf, Article020HelpSystem.swf & Article020HelpSystem.swf
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Building Tornado and Spider Charts in Crystal Xcelsius
This article shows how Tornado Charts and Spider Plots can be incorporated in Crystal Xcelsius dashboards and visualizations. Such charts can be enormously useful in analyzing data and mathematical models that are complex and can vary in subtle and unobvious ways.
This article gives you a peek "under the hood" on how these charts are constructed.
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Building a Data Classification Tool in Crystal Xcelsius
Visualizing data is one side of the coin for dashboards. The flip side, especially for Crystal Xcelsius, is the ability to characterize or classify data on the fly, by interacting with visual components on the dashboard. This article shows how a data classifier tool is built and used in Crystal Xcelsius.
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Constructing a Simplified Gantt Chart in Crystal Xcelsius
One of the interesting features of Crystal Xcelsius is the ability to incorporate a working spreadsheet with hidden dependencies inside of a dashboard or data presentation. This article shows how to create a simplified Gantt Chart where such dependencies come into play. Emphasis is placed on the process of designing the interface.
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Targets, Actuals, and Gaps: Representing business data over different timeline intervals
Timeline data is sometimes easy to obtain but can at times be difficult to present. This article illustrates simple and effective techniques for presenting timeline where some degree of analysis is required as it relates to presenting drill down capabilities with Key Performance Indicators (KPI).
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Put a Stopwatch in your Dashboard
Dashboards are natural tools for training and simulation. In a training scenario, it may be helpful to develop some metrics to measure progress. You could, for instance, devise a routine to track the number of correct answers to a series of questions. A first step is to count the number of questions answered correctly. Another revealing metric is how long it takes to answer question. This article shows how to implement such features in Crystal Xcelsius.
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Building Standalone Applications with Crystal Xcelsius
We are all used to building dashboards as a part of a presentation or report; but what about building standalone applications using Crystal Xcelsius? This article explores some basic ground rules using an example drawn from the popular game called Sudoku.
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Moving Averages in your Crystal Xcelsius dashboards
A dashboard represents the intersection of visualization, interactivity, and analytics; hence, the term visual analytics. An important aspect in time series data is to show information and compute moving averages for such data. While this capability exists within Excel, its interactive capability is not easily harnessed in spreadsheets. This article explains how to prepare and represent interactive moving averages in your Crystal Xcelsius dashboards.
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Geometric Widgets: new approaches to visualizing data in your Crystal Xcelsius dashboards
One of the benefits of using Crystal Xcelsius is that the widgets and dashboards you can create are highly interactive. Interestingly enough, that interactivity can be extended further. This article shows one of the ways you can create dynamic geometric shapes that can resize and reposition themselves at the touch of a slider or change in data.
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Taking Dashboards to the next Level: Dashboard Simulators™
This article introduces Dashboard Simulators™ and illustrates basic techniques for creating and applying them. Dashboard Simulators™ allow you do things you can't normally do in Excel… at least not easily. Some of their basic facilities include incrementing and looping mechanisms. Others entail altering how computations are performed. This article addresses how to harness these capabilities in ways you wouldn't ordinarily think about when working with conventional spreadsheets. In the process, practical issues in deploying Dashboard Simulators™ are explained.
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Crystal Xcelsius Best Practices: Audio Overlays in your Business Dashboards
From time to time when you create a business dashboard, it might be helpful to include context sensitive help. One particularly engaging method is inserting a Flash animation file with audio overlays. The result is like listening to a live narrator who walks you through the dashboard, step by step. This article shows you how to accomplish this.
IMPORTANT: Download the files in the links below to a common directory (depending on your browser, you will likely need to right-mouse click the files). Once you have the XLF files you will need to reimport the spreadsheet and LayeringExample01SharedRadio.swf file, so that file paths match your computer.
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Dashboard Multi-Layer Control: A Best Practice
This article gives you a best practice for providing multi-layer control of your interactive visual dashboard. The overall approach to multi-layer control is to set-up a mapping that tells Crystal Xcelsius exactly how you want it to behave.
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Black-Scholes Options Pricing: Creating Matrix Calculators with Xcelsius
This article from the September 2005 issue of the Xcelsius newsletter shows you how to use Xcelsius to turn a spreadsheet of the Black-Scholes options pricing model into a powerful matrix-style calculator.
You will also learn how you can: use Alerts to color-code ranges of numbers, and use Sliders to set, and easily vary, a sequence of input values in order to perform multiple what-if scenarios, quickly.
NOTE: The Matrix Calculator Black-Scholes spreadsheet can be found in the book: Excel Best Practices for Business, by Loren Abdulezer, the author of this article.
To obtain the book, please go to:
http://www.amazon.com/excel
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Creating Interactive Calendars in Xcelsius
This article from the August 2005 issue of the Xcelsius newsletter outlines how to use Interactive Calendarswith Xcelsius XL Professional and XE Enterprise edition.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The Interactive Calendar component requires Xcelsius XL Professional or XE Enterprise (either trial version or the full license).
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Creating "Smart" Sliders in Xcelsius
This article from the July 2005 issue of the Xcelsius newsletter outlines how to use Smart Sliders with Xcelsius XL Professional and XE Enterprise edition.
IMPORTANT NOTE: To open and modify the .XLF source file, you will need to use Xcelsius XL Professional or XE Enterprise (either trial version or the full license).
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
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Xcelsius Drill Down Charts: Can it get any easier than this?
This article from the June 2005 issue of the Xcelsius newsletter outlines how to use the Drill Down feature of the Xcelsius XL Professional and Enterprise.
IMPORTANT NOTE: To open and modify the .XLF source file, you will need to use Xcelsius XL Professional or Enterprise (either trial version or the fully licensed product [if you are using Xcelsius 3.5 or earlier you will need to upgrade to the current release]).
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
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Xcelsius Version 4 Preview: Using the Accordion Component
This article from the May 2005 issue of the Xcelsius newsletter outlines how to use a new feature of the Xcelsius Version 4 (X4) product; the accordion component. It also outlines some other features of X4.
IMPORTANT NOTE: To open and modify the .XLF source file, you will need to use Xcelsius Version 4 (either trial version or the upgrade to 3.5). You can open the downloadable spreadsheet or the compiled .SWF file or generated PDF file, but you will not be able to use Xcelsius 3.5 or earlier to change or manipuate the components. The accordion component and X4 files are not compatible with earlier versions.
THE XCELSIUS PDF FILE IS ONLY VIEWABLE WITH ACROBAT VERSION 6 OR LATER. ANY EARLIER VERSION WILL RENDER AS A BLANK PAGE.
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
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Click on image below to view full size screen shot
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An Abacus Inspired Visual Calculator
This article from the April 2005 issue of the Xcelsius newsletter outlines an approach analyzing the impact of uncertainty in financial analysis.
Part of this article is focused on how Xcelsius can be used to better analyze implicit relations in mathematical models.
The remainder of the article is centered around effective techniques and design decisions you may want to consider as you build your own tools with Xcelsius.
Click on the links for:
IMPORTANT NOTE: You must register on the Xcelsius Journal site to download files (it's free).
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