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Hands-on immersion training can be tough but when your classroom looks out on to the Pacific Ocean of Southern California and during the breaks you can walk out on to the balcony and watch surfers riding the waves, it’s not so bad. This year’s InfoSol Business Intelligence Seminar (IBIS) was ...

As Xcelsius becomes more widely used and more mature, the level of complexity and creativity in its usage in Business Intelligence applications appears to grow exponentially. This was the third year of InfoSol’s Best Xcelsius Dashboard Awards and there was no shortage of great dashboards on display at IBIS 2010 at the Ritz Carlton, Laguna Niguel, California.

A company recently approached us with an interesting requirement concerning how to more efficiently distribute information about mobile phone usage to each of their hundreds of customers. The method they were currently using was manual and labor intensive as they were pulling information into Excel spreadsheets, creating graphs and then ...

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 ...

For a humble BusinessObjects follower used to attending conferences where 3,000 attendees was considered big, stepping into my first SAP Sapphire event was somewhat like the small town guy going to the city for the first time.  With some 15,000 attendees, an exhibit and keynote area the size of half ...

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 ...

On my last day in London, after being stranded for 10 days by the Icelandic volcanic eruption, I decided to go visit Shakespeare’s Globe Theater.  This is a neat reconstruction of what was thought to be a likeness of the original Globe theater of Shakespeare’s day built about 200 yards ...

In addition to the Xcelsius Dashboard Maintenance – Best Practices – Using Labels in Excel I wanted to share other important aspects of making Xcelsius dashboards easy to maintain and for other developers to understand.  One such practice is having some kind of conformity in your approach to how you lay out ...

The stream of articles, white papers and videos desperately trying to convince the business community of the negative impact of poor data quality on their bottom line seems to be never ending.  It almost seems like the IT brigade is marching into a cul-de-sac at the end of which is ...

I arrived late at night at Copenhagen airport and headed for the taxi rank to get to my hotel. As I exited the terminal, there was a large sign pointing to “Danish Taxis” to the right and “Swedish Taxis” to the left. Not understanding the difference, I figured I should ...

Although Switzerland is a relatively small country, there are four distinctive cultures speaking four different languages within its borders. There are French, German, Italian and Rumantsch regions all speaking their respective languages. This leads to some interesting situations as I discovered when meeting with perspective partners there. The first partner ...

After my previous disastrous attempts to ski when I visited my son last year, he suggested I try snowboarding. When I told him I had heard it was more difficult than skiing, he just shrugged and said that I couldn’t do any worse. I figured he had a point and ...

In this post I will share with you a sample of what I consider to be one of many “best practices” to help in the ongoing maintenance of Xcelsius dashboards; Using labels in your Excel Spreadheet.  Some of the content in this post is extracted from the Excel for Xcelsius ...

A weekend in the middle of my trip gives me the opportunity to visit my son who works and snowboards in the French Alps for six months of the year. He has to work on the Saturday so he sets me up in an Italian restaurant /pub with WiFi so ...

As I checked out of my hotel in Paris, I had finally figured out how to use my high-tech, multi-functional room key. When I checked in, I was given a room card key with some writing on it that I did not pay attention to until I got to the ...