Upcoming Webinars

The following is a list to our upcoming webinars… Follow the link next to the webinar date to register.

InfoBurst Webinars

November 5 – 11A PST – http://goo.gl/EZpQ
November 8 – 11A PST – http://goo.gl/036g
November 10 – 11A PST – http://goo.gl/8ewE
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November 15 – 11A PST – http://goo.gl/vhW2

360 View Webinars

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Yolande Grill is the Vice President of Business Development at InfoSol Inc. I would like to think of myself as the Chief Transformation Officer. My favorite quote to ponder is one from Trina Paulus. "How Exactly does one become a butterfly? You must want to fly so badly, that you are willing to give up being a catterpillar"

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Integrating Xcelsius into Crystal Reports Series – 2 of 3

As usual, before getting started I want to provide a quick recap of where we are with the Reportapalooza competition. This is the last week of voting before the final winner is announced on Nov 22th!

Challenge #1 (Done) – Winner , Mico Yuk (Check out my Coffee Consumption Calculator)Challenge #2 (Done) – Winner, Mico Yuk (based on traffic sent to Report a Hero Page)Challenge #3 (Done) – Winner, Brian Durning (voted best Crystal Reports Video by Community)Challenge #4 (Done) – Winner, David Deitch (voted best Charity Dashboard by Community)Challenge #5 (In Progress) – What this series of blog post is about.Community Dashboard Challenge (In Progress) – Vote until Nov 12th, 2010 for your favorite community dashboard.

In Part 1 of this series I went over some Q&A on what it would take to embed your Xcelsius visualization (in this case a map) into your Crystal Report, as well as some pros and cons.   In Part 2 I am going to cover how to set up your map in Xcelsius so that it can be consumed by Crystal Reports.  For this example we will be using Google Maps (compliments of Centigon Solutions) as it much more robust than the out of box maps in Xcelsius.

1.       Install Google Maps Plug-in for Xcelsius (more details on how to do this here)

2.       Add the  GMaps Plugin to your Xcelsius dashboard

3. Configure your Excel spreadsheet to hold 2 columns of data for the Google Map: 1) Map Address 2) Map Labels

4.       Go to Data Connections in Xcelsius -> Add the ‘Crystal Reports Data Consumer’ Connection

5.       Configure the ‘Crystal Reports Data Consumer’ Connection so that the ‘Row Headers’ are bound to the  Excel cell area you created in Step #3

In Part 3 I will focus on the final step:  Bringing your Xcelsius Map into Crystal Reports.

One last thing, please don’t forget to cast your votes on the 3 dashboards that were submitted by the community to show your support.

Mico Yuk is a 2010 SAP Mentor and the founder of the Xcelsius Guru Network and the Everything Xcelsius blog. To learn more about her, please visit our About Us page.

Tags: Business Objects, BusinessObjects, Centigon Solutions, Reportapalooza, SAP Crystal Dashboard Design, Xcelsius 2008, Xcelsius 2008 Tips

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Difference OpenDocument Crystal Reports and WebI

Posted on 14 April 2010 9:53 am.Femke

I experienced some frustations when trying to open 2 different reports (Crystal Reports and WebI), however both were built on same universe and used same objects, from the same URL button in Xcelsius.

The OpenDocument statement for the WebI report was quickly set up, however the Crystal Reports took some time. Even after consulting chapter 3 Crystal Reports in the PDF Viewing Reports and Documents using URLs (for BOXI 3.1) I could not get it to work.

Finally I figured it out by reading several forum topics, in the end the URL was built as follows:

../../../OpenDocument/opendoc/openDocument.jsp?

Identifies Crystal Reports reportH stands for HTML, unfortunately in 3.1 pdf is not supported anymoreforces reports to open in new windowKeeps Xcelsius dashboard “alive”CustomerCode is name of prompt, 0019 is customer code value, note “” to identify stringfoldername in Infoview, don’t forget []identification type, preferred in OTAP streetsforces reports to open in new windowKeeps Xcelsius dashboard “alive”CustomerCode is name of prompt, 0019 is customer code valueYou can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Colours and Performance

What makes a Guru? Is it a person that already knows everything on a subject?

I believe it is someone who knows that they do not know everything and is still willing to explore and discover. As I have learned. We’re all quite used to using the RAG / Red Yellow Green / Traffic light approach to performance, but what happens when that fails?

A few years back I was part of a 3 man team involved in a Dashboard development for the Executive Committee of a mine in southern Africa. I was wise in the ways of visualising data, I knew Xcelsius inside out, I could deliver anything they asked for and more. I spent long hours designing and developing numerous different dashboards, from Strategy Scorecards to SHE reports. The main dashboard was the Scorecard and all other dashboards would be accessible from it. The Project Champion (member of Exco) was thrilled with what we delivered, he then presented to the rest of the Exco team…

They loved it, but there was a major issue. 2 Members couldn’t see the KPI performance clearly… Wait what? Our scope was to build the dashboard with large text so the old guys in the back could follow… We couldn’t understand, what had we done wrong? He then continued to explain why, as he himself only just discovered the reason. 2 Members of the 8 man Exco team was colour blind.

This was the first time in my Dashboard Development career that I had come across this particular hurdle. As it turns out, colour blindness is more common than I originally thought, and it’s not as the myth goes, only men that are colour blind.

Visit the Colour Scheme Generator and use the Vision Simulation to see how colour blind people see different colours.

So now we were faced with an interesting problem, since performance is generally displayed as Green – Good / Red – Bad. We needed to come up with a solution and re-present the next day. I thought about it, and the solution was quite simple. We would introduce different shapes along with the performance colours.

As we were using a XY Chart (No Scorecard component back in those days, you whipper snappers have it easy) to show the performance all we needed to do was create a copy and change the shapes, slap in a toggle and Bob’s your uncle.

After presenting the revised Scorecard to the Exco team everyone was happy. This was an interesting lesson to learn and one that I have carried with me for the last couple of years. It has served me well.

My advice to you as my fellow Xcelsius developers is as follows; In the design session with your client raise the subject of colour blindness with relation to performance colours and address the problem before it becomes a problem.

Further more, head over to colour-blindness.com and take the fun Ishihara Test for Color Blindness and the Color Arrangement Test.

Please share your experiences by leaving a comment…

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Conditional Formatting in Crystal Reports

What exactly is Conditional Formatting in Crystal Reports?

Conditional formatting, put simply, is formatting  (e.g, font color, font style, etc.) applied to data that meets certain rules or conditions.  For example, the person requesting the report would like the Total Sales field to have a green background if the amount is greater than $5000.

But how is this conditional formatting magic done?

Select the field to be formatted.Right-click and choose the border tab – background color is in the center of that tab.Do not click in the color checkbox, rather click on the X+2 box directly to the right of the background color. The Formula Editor will open.In the Operators column choose Control Structures for the If Then Else.Double-click to bring that down to the work area. At the top of the functions column, you’ll see two new categories associated with formatting text/numbers: Formatting FunctionsColor ConstantsNow the tricky part: you have to construct a formula. I’ve included a couple of examples below.if Sum ({Orders.Order Amount}, {@GroupSort})>5000 then crGreen else crNoColor

Note that the colors are preceded by cr in lower case – Crystal Reports needs this, so do not enter a color name without it.  Also note that the else argument is followed by crNoColor.  The else could also be followed by DefaultAttribute, like so:

if Sum ({Orders.Order Amount}, {@GroupSort})>5000 then crGreen else DefaultAttribute

The results would be the same but the second formula would revert back to whatever the formatting color was that did not meet the condition. Of course, the formulas could be much more complex but the logic remains the same.  If the formula returns true do this othewise do something else.

Happy formatting!

We cover conditional formatting in our Introduction to Crystal Reports class.

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Xcelsius Will Always Be Xcelsius

So what’s in a name? Some people will tell you “everything” while others will tell you it depends on what you are naming.

Some products have not only become defined by their name but have been so successful they end up defining all products of the same type like “Kleenex” and “Band-Aid” .  Others have found out that their product name can end up portraying the wrong image like Chevrolet’s Nova car – “No va” meaning “it doesn’t go” in Spanish! The French company Bull Computers also had a hard time with its “Bull” named products in North America.  However, Bull also launched a clever marketing campaign around the ambiguity of its name entitled “Know Bull” which did get some attention.

At this year’s Sapphire, Sir Richard Branson told this great story of how when he went to register the name “Virgin” for his company in the UK, the company registration official turned it down because they deemed the name as rude. So Branson returned the next day with a dictionary showing the definition of “virgin” as being pure and they accepted it.

So I have been somewhat intrigued about recent forum discussions surrounding SAP’s decision to rename Xcelsius – their amazing and very popular dashboard product.

Xcelsius already had some name recognition when Business Objects acquired Infommersion (the original developers) in November 2005 but then proceeded to rename it Crystal Xcelsius. This resulted in a lot of confusion as people started to relate the product to Crystal Reports and thought it was an add-on to this report writer product.  So when the next major release was developed, the decision was made to drop the Crystal name and so Xcelsius 2008 came to market.

For the last two years Xcelsius has become one of the most popular and prolifically used BI dashboard products in the marketplace and its name has become synonymous with data visualization and dynamic dashboards. 

So why would you take this very well known product with such a cool and catchy name as Xcelsius and rename it SAP Crystal Dashboard Design or SAP Enterprise Dashboard Design?

Well apparently this is because SAP uses a “master brand strategy” where SAP is the master brand and the product brand name takes a back seat. 

So why not SAP Xcelsius?

Well this is because SAP also uses “descriptive naming” for all its products so in the case of Xcelsius, the back seat has been completely removed!

Since “SAP Crystal Dashboard Design” is so long, it is bound to become abbreviated. However, I doubt this will be shortened to “SCDD” since a Google search points you to the “California State Council on Development Disabilities” .  It is more likely to become “Dashboard Design” since that is the new descriptive product name.  A Google search on “Dashboard Design” comes up with about 2.5 million results starting off with Qlikview, followed by Tableau Software then Corda and SAP Crystal Dashboard Design comes in at about number 14.  Interestingly, there is little ambiguity when you search on “Xcelsius”.

Translating Dashboard Design into other languages may also prove interesting.  Xcelsius will always translate into Xcelsius in all languages and I have a feeling the name will persist. At the end of the day, it is not just the name that counts, it’s the product itself. Xcelsius is as unique as a product as it is as a name. I will never forget that day in 2005 when I first saw it and was totally blown away. Infommersion created something truly amazing and ahead of its time. It remains top of its class and, for me, Xcelsius will always be Xcelsius.

Paul Grill started his career in Information Technology in the U.K. in 1978, as an Executive Data Processing Trainee for Honeywell. More than thirty years later, he still has a voracious appetite for learning as Information Technology continues to advance at an ever accelerating pace. He was first introduced to the world of Business Intelligence in 1991, in France, when he saw a demonstration of an early version of BusinessObjects on Windows 2.1. He returned to the U.S. to rave about this phenomenal product, but it was many years before BusinessObjects made it into the mainstream. Paul founded InfoSol in 1997, and made Business Intelligence one of the key solutions offered by the company. Today, InfoSol is a leading SAP BusinessObjects solutions partner, known for its expert consulting, education and innovative add-on solutions. Paul is well known within the SAP BusinessObjects community for his extensive knowledge of Business Intelligence, and he has lectured and written many articles on the subject. Paul enjoys writing, running and coaching kids soccer, and is passionate about Ancient Egyptology.

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Comparing Xcelsius 2008 Editions

Business Objects Started off Offering Crystal Xcelsius as a single edition. Later with 4.5 they came up with 2 editions, Designer and Workgroup. Starting 2008, they have significantly increased in terms of various flavors of the software. Now they have 4 editions, allowing the customers to choose whatever they want based on the Price and requirements. The 4 editions are below. Detailed Comparison here.

Xcelsius PresentXcelsius EngageXcelsius Engage ServerBusinessObjects Xcelsius EnterpriseBe the first to like this post.

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