Dashboard Software

[Guest]

Does anyone one have any experience with or comments on 3rd party software to
create Dashboards? Has anyone used Crystal Xcelsius? IF so any comments
good or bad would be appreciated.

 

[Kelly O'Day]

eplfan

Since your post showed up on the Excel Charting forum, let me give you some
Excel related information.

Charley Kyd at ExcelUser.Com has an excellent, 150 page e-book that
shows you exactly how to make effective dashboards in Excel. The e-book
covers everything that I have needed to make dashboards, including setting
up data sets, control sheets, color, chart formatting, and the use of
Excel's camera tool.

For $25, it is your best first stop.
http://www.exceluser.com/dash/startdash.htm

As for Xcelsius, I suggest the DataPigTechnologies site.
http://www.datapigtechnologies.com/index.htm
Mike Alexander has a series of Xcelsius tutorials that should give you a
good idea of what you can do it.


....Kelly

(e-mail address removed)

 

[Ant.]

...including setting
up data sets, control sheets, color, chart formatting, and the use of
Excel's camera tool.

Hey Kelly, I just posted a question about using excel to create
dashboard style reports. I'm using the camera tool to take snapshots
of charts on different worksheets, and put them together on the first
sheet to create the dashboard. I'm having terrible trouble with
elements inside the charts resizing when I hit print preview. Any idea
why this is happening? Do you use the camera tool for charts, or just
tables? Very keen to hear from you.

Thanks, Ant.

 

[Jon Peltier]

I've read Charley's book, and I've created Flash displays using Xcelsius.

If you want a straightforward set of easily updatable charts, Charley's book
is a very good investment. He describes a top to bottom system that easily
updates each month, and systematically shows lots of data in a single page.
These dashboards are a great way to display data from a single point in
time. You could get creative with dynamic ranges and worksheet controls
(sliders, etc.) to enable what-if analyses in these workbooks, though
Charley does not cover such embellishments.

Xcelsius is better suited to fancy marketing-type displays. It incorporates
many but not all of Excel's features, and unless you license the Enterprise
version, it's basically independent of changing data. The effects are very
fancy, but the design interface is less easy to manipulate than objects in
an Office app, such as PowerPoint. An Xcelsius model can be embedded in a
PowerPoint presentation, a PDF file, or a web page. These models are well
suited to what if analyses; its controls activate the Flash animation
according to the logic of the embedded Excel worksheet.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Peltier Technical Services - Tutorials and Custom Solutions -
http://PeltierTech.com/
2006 Excel User Conference, 19-21 April, Atlantic City, NJ
http://peltiertech.com/Excel/ExcelUserConf06.html
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