My Life With BusinessObjects

For whatever reason, SAP doesn’t put obvious information like “Xcelsius 2008 Service Pack 2″ on its About screen.  Instead, you need a secret decoder ring to determine the version.  Fortunately, the Xcelsius folks at SAP have placed this information in the Release Notes documentation, which is available on the SAP Help Portal. I’ve recreated it [...]

Just in time for Christmas, Xcelsius 2008 SP3 arrived this week. Timo Elliot has an excellent summary of its new features and Ryan Goodman lists his favorite top 10 enhancements.  Service Pack 3 is intended to keep everyone sated until the next major release of Xcelsius arrives next year, presumably with the rest of the [...]

One of the advantages of having a personal blog like this one is that it gives you a space to write down stuff worth remembering that you might forget later. I have discovered that I’m usually not the only person having a problem getting something to work, and even a modest tip or trick is [...]

Xcelsius 2008 Dashboard Best PracticesLoren AbdulezerCopyright © 2009 by Pearson Education, Inc. I’ve spent a lot of time in 2008 and 2009 creating Xcelsius dashboards for various clients. A book that I have found very helpful is Loren Abdulezer’s Xcelsius 2008 Dashboard Best Practices. According to the bio on the back of the book, Loren [...]

NOTE: This post was originally authored on 07/21/2008 and updated on 05/05/2009. Xcelsius 2008 provides a large collection of geographic maps for data mapping. One of the challenges with working with those maps is specifying the region key lookup codes for each state/province/country on the map. Beginning with Xcelsius 2008 SP1, the product includes a [...]

Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of DataStephen FewCopyright © 2006 O’Reilly Media You can, as the adage goes, judge a book by its cover. Take, for example, the spartan cover of Stephen Few’s Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data. Designed by the author himself, it sets the tone for a [...]