Tech Tips

Venn diagrams provide an elegant and powerful visual display of information. In essence, a Venn diagram compares the size of two or more groups while simultaneously presenting the level of overlap that exists among the groups. Just for the sake of review, let’s look at a simple business example. The ...

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 ...

In the last two months, I have attended three regional independent BusinessObjects and Crystal User Group Meetings that have simply been amazing both in terms of their content and user participation. One was in Pennsylvania, one in Michigan and one in Arizona. Each one had between 50 to 70 attendees, ...

IBIS 2011 kicked off last night with its welcome reception and solutions showcase demonstrating some of the latest business intelligence solutions and one solution in particular created quite a buzz – MyBI Mobile. As I walked around the showcase showing Xcelsius dashboards running on an iPad, people stopped with looks ...

I was recently asked this question on how best to handle a 13 month dataset when in the dashboard the goal is to only display monthly detail and summary data.  This is a good question and in my opinion worth sharing here because it is dealing with boosting Xcelsius backend ...

I just saw Rod Stewart in concert last week and he was truly awesome. The musicians and singers supporting him were just fantastic and the whole set was so tight and so professional. It felt as though they had been playing together for years but they actually had only started ...

What can I do if Xcelsius is chopping off the leading zero’s in my order numbers? This question comes up often when I’m teaching an Xcelsius training class.  Often enough that I’ve decided to discuss the solution here in a tech tip on our blog. This scenario can happen with different data ...

Problem A: I have data that could be in the 1000s but sometimes could be 1 or 2.  Users do not want to see a division of 1.5 (or any part of a whole) since the data is tracking incidents and there are never “half incidents.”  How do I force ...

Question: What is a Flash Variable connection and what is it used for?     Answer: Flash Variable connection is used to pass a variable from one dashboard or interface to the second dashboard.     Let us consider two dashboards here: a) Parent dashboard  – from which you will be passing a variable to ...

Question: How can I get user-specific data results for Xcelsius dashboards viewed through BusinessObjects InfoView? Answer: There are a few application variables that BusinessObjects provides for use when a user logs into InfoView, one of which is BOUSER.  BOUser is the variable for the userId that is logged in and ...