Upgrading to Office 2010 with Xcelsius 2008

The fun started when I decided to upgrade to Office 2010 with Xcelsius 2008… I tried to find service pack 4 for Xcelsius 2008 on SAP’s Business Objects support website, and got confused because following the links and unzipping what was labeled as Service Pack 4, turned out to be Service Pack 3.

Thinking that I must have clicked on the wrong link on the download site, I tried again retracing my steps… Yes, I did this several times before I searched the Internet and found that others are having this difficulty as well!

Xcelsius release notes indeed say that Office 2010 was supported. Hmmm!

And, with some effort, I guess it is, but only after you change a lot of security settings within Office 2010!!!
Now, the order in which you install Office 2010 and Xcelsius SP4 still seems to be a toss-up with the majority of users favoring an upgrade to Office 2010 first followed by the Xcelsius upgrade. Either way you will need to do a lot of adjustments to security within Excel 2010 and PowerPoint 2010 in order to get Xcelsius to “play nice” with them!!! If you do not, you will experience bizarre behavior within PowerPoint. For example, if you export your dashboard to PowerPoint 2010 and open it up as a slideshow, you will miss your mouse as you move over the embedded dashboard making it impossible to interact with the dashboard. You will also get a lot of “server busy” messages when opening Xcelsius, as it is talking to Excel and applying lots of security options that are set by default when you install Office 2010.

Below, I have documented the steps I have taken to get Excel 2010 and PowerPoint 2010 to work well with Xcelsius 2008 SP4.

Download Service Pack 4 for Xcelsius

1.) Go to SAP Business Objects software download site

2.) Software product: Dashboard Presentation Design (Xcelsius)
3.) Product Version: Xcelsius 2008
4.) Click on the link that says Xcelsius Present 2008 Service Pack 4….(see screen shot below)…

download Xcelsius SP4

5.) The file will be named: xcelsiuspres2008_sp4.zip (see screen shot below). Save to your computer.

save file

6.) Un-zip the files to your local machine. All files contained within the above zipped file say Service Pack 3. Hmmm! This is not correct, I think it should say service pack 4!

Install Office 2010

Refer to Office 2010 install package…

Install Xcelsius Service Pack 4

7.) Double-click on the Setup.exe file in the extracted file list…
8.) When you actually install this service pack your version of Xcelsius should be:
Version: 5.4.0.0
Build: 12,4,0,116

Install Xcelsius

Configure Office PowerPoint 2010 Trusted Settings
To get rid of missing mouse in PowerPoint…

• PowerPoint 2010: Settings should be under File>Options>Trust Center>Trust Center Settings>
• Active X Settings: Enable All controls without restrictions and without prompting
• Trusted Locations: Disable All trusted locations
• Privacy Options: Un-Click All

Configure Office Excel 2010 Trusted Settings

To get rid of “server busy” message in Xcelsius 2008 SP4

• Excel 2010 settings: File>Options> Trust Center>Trust Center Settings>
• Active X Settings: Enable All controls without restrictions and without prompting
• Protected View: None checked
• Message bar: Never show information about blocked content
• File Block Settings: None checked and Open selected file types in Protected View and allow editing
• Privacy Options: Un-Click All

I welcome your comments and experience.