David Lai's Business Intelligence Blog

Building Scorecards in Xcelsius 2008 and the significance of Global Embedded Fonts

One of the very powerful new additions to Xcelsius 2008 is the ability to create scorecards easily. If we wanted to create scorecards in Xcelsius 4.5 we would need to manually insert trending icons into each row in order to create a scorecard. In Xcelsius 2008 however we can use a label based menu with alerts. The alerts will act as the trending icons and from there we only need one object to show...

Importance of Web Intelligence Contexts

With calculation contexts in web intelligence we are able to generate powerful reports quick and easily. Let’s take an example where we have the following dimensions (year, quarter, product) and measure (revenue). We can easily build a table to represent the sales revenue for each product in that quarter and year. Now what if we wanted to display the sales revenue in a different context. For...

Xcelsius 2008 Refresh on Load

One of the major issues I’ve encountered with Xcelsius 2008 was refreshing too many Live Office components on load from the Data Manager. This would cause the browser to crash when loading the swf. I’m not sure if it’s a bug but a workaround I discovered was to use a Reporting Services Button to perform the refresh on load. You can find the button in the Web Connectivity components...

Alpha Numeric Sorter

Here is an Xcelsius Example that ranks your table based on whether you want to rank it numerically or alphabetically. [kml_flashembed publishmethod=”static” fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://www.davidlai101.com/blog/media/blogs/bobj/Excel%20Ranker/Alphanumeric%20Sorter.swf” width=”500″ height=”200″ targetclass=”flashmovie”] [/kml_flashembed] Many...