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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 ...

A second day in Paris and another day full of meetings. The second meeting is over lunch at a classic French restaurant situated next to the famous Opera with elaborately painted ceilings and a platoon of waiting staff for every table.  Each of the menu choices requires a paragraph of ...

I arrive in Paris in the middle of a train strike and I am expecting the worst but as I step off the Eurostar train from London (not on strike – different company) and jump on the Metro (not on strike – different company), I notice nothing unusual.  I was ...

After only 2 hours sleep on the trans-Atlantic flight (I should never have watched that in-flight movie “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll”), I finally arrived at my sister’s house in London only to find nobody in.  With two suitcases and a backpack, I parked myself on her doorstep ...

A few years ago I was on vacation in the South of Spain staying at a small local hotel. After spending a day sightseeing I returned to my room to find a huge trail of ants had entered through a bathroom window. I walked down to the reception to report ...

I recently heard a story on the radio about a farmer in England who had secretly built a castle behind a wall of haystacks so the local planning authority would not find out. He had been denied permission to build the castle but he did some research and discovered what ...

Question: Have you ever created a formula, to build a string of text, and wanted to format parts of it separately? Answer: Use HTML codes to format your string. Explanation This Tech Tip uses the Customer Table from the Sample Database that comes with Crystal Reports. The easiest way to ...

With the Winter Olympics kicking off this week, I was reminded of my own somewhat painful experiences on the slopes. The first time I ever attempted to ski was at a small ski resort in Northern Arizona.  At the advice of my wife I attended the Beginner Camp with about ...

As more people deploy Xcelsius dashboard solutions, Xcelsius connectivity options has become a hot topic and I am often asked to compare the most popular methods used by BusinessObjects customers which are Query as a Web Service (QaaWS), Live Office and InfoBurst-XDS (or XDM for non-BOE deployments).

I like to take late evening or red-eye flights in order not to lose the day travelling, so when I arrived at Detroit Metro airport recently at 1:30 am this was not unusual for me. I picked up a rental car and arrived at my hotel at 2:30 am with ...

I recently came across an article that stated ‘No Data Warehouse Required for BI’.  I immediately understood that the article is going to stress the relevance of operational Business Intelligence (BI) over constructing data warehouses in a typical BI environment. I am a big believer of the fact that building ...

I live in a small town where most of the town services are contracted out.  Our police services are provided by the County Sherriff and our fire and ambulance by a private company.  Living in the Arizona desert, we get a few unique services like removal of snakes by the ...