Tag Archives: Best Practices

Moving from the old Universe Design Tool (UDT) to the new Information Design Tool (IDT) is a bit like upgrading your washing machine. The new washing machines have lots of additional features and can be set to do dozens of different cycles, washes, rinses, spins – you can even change ...

With news, social media and conversation completely dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, I was hesitant to write a blog that even mentions it. At the same time because I am so passionate about Business Intelligence and can see how it is being both used and abused in this situation, I ...

This blog is aimed at Xcelsius users who want to migrate their .xlfs into Squirrel. To everyone else — don’t let this put you off, it’s still an interesting read and you might pick up a few hints and tips along the way. The first thing to know is Our ...

I have been designing dashboards with Xcelsius and Custom Code (HTML5) the past couple of years and I wanted to share how you can design dashboards like a pro. Personally, I am an advocate for designing dashboards with Adobe Illustrator. I found it the easiest to learn.  You can choose ...

In this tech tip, you will learn how to dynamically switch a break dimension using an input control.  We will start with a cross table that was created in the Alternate Break Value Highlighting tech tip, but you can substitute any 2 dimensions you would like to work with.  This ...

While the built in alternate row shading is nice to shade every other row or a set a pattern of rows, what if you wanted to shade rows based on a variable number of rows in a break?  We can accomplish this by using a variable and a conditional formatting ...

Onsite at a client location, I asked “What is the main function of I.T.?” A client responded, “It’s keeping up with technology!”  In our world, we are constantly bombarded with upgrades and future migrations. Today, I am sharing my knowledge as an expert in BusinessObjects landscape assessments, migrations and upgrades. ...

Tip: Error found at 00 Trick: Truncating datetime to seconds We recently worked with a customer to provide a solution to a datetime field in their PI SQL database (OSI) that was returning a SQL parsing error when using it in a query filter.  Specifically, the error stated “Error found ...

One of the often overlooked additions given to us in the 4.2 SP3 release was the ability to merge data on variables, not just dimensions.  For many years we have lived with these restrictions in Web Intelligence: 1.) You could only merge on dimensions, not on variables. 2.) The data ...

Tip: How to pick up User Token or ID from HTTP Headers for use in a Dashboard. Trick: Use InfoBurst to inject the value into the dashboard. Figuring out security in your dashboards can often be one of the more difficult pieces to solve. Often times, we’re able to make ...