The new Star Wars movie epic – The Force Awakens – was a blockbuster before it even opened and will thrive like all its six predecessors until the next one comes along in 2017. So how does a phenomenon like this, created almost 40 years ago, still draw the masses? …
Read More »Farewell to a True BI Visionary
Santiago Becerra, the founder of Infommersion (creators of Xcelsius) and co-founder of Mellmo (creators of Roambi), passed away last week. I had the honor of knowing this true data visualization visionary who helped revolutionize BI dashboards and inspired millions to interact with data in a whole new way. I first met Santiago …
Read More »Tigers and Entrepreneurship – Reflections on 2015 and fun dashboards at InfoSol
So much happened in 2015 and the general consensus with everyone that I’ve talked to is that the year flew by too fast. When I reflect on all the projects that we accomplished I can hardly believe that it was possible. My plan is not to list these here but …
Read More »Are you having trouble opening your Xcelsius Canvas? Here’s what to do.
This was a typical call/scenario we saw for some Xcelsius developers today: Hello, I decided to open up a dashboard that I was recently working on and the canvas will not open up today. The Excel spreadsheet opens fine with all the data but the canvas will not. I decided …
Read More »Christmas Windows and BI Portals
Although I am originally from London, UK, it has been a long time since I checked out the Christmas window displays at the major retail stores. The world famous department stores like Harrods, Selfridges and Fortnum & Mason go all out as do the elite fashion stores on Bond Street …
Read More »HTML5 with XDC and dCode Gives Xcelsius a Bright Future
I have noticed an interesting trend amongst SAP folks in the last few months that they are starting to call SAP BO Dashboards by its original name of Xcelsius again. While the name Xcelsius never really went away, I wondered if this new trend is due to the fact that …
Read More »Why Visual Design Studio will NEVER replace Xcelsius
This week I was invited by an SAP BusinessObjects customer to participate in a discussion with SAP regarding whether they should use Visual Design Studio or Xcelsius to develop new dashboard based BI applications for a new project. The representatives from SAP explained the roadmap for their BI tools that …
Read More »Let’s Speak BO
I had the unfortunate experience of having a root canal performed last week and it was not pleasant, but during the procedure I was totally fascinated by the way the Endodontist spoke to his assistant. He used terms and an entire language that I didn’t understand, but was second nature …
Read More »Is SAP Out of Sync with its BusinessObjects Customers?
This is a question I asked at the Town Hall session at the recent SAP Analytics and BusinessObjects Conference held in Ft. Worth, Texas. I qualified the question by stating that everything that SAP was promoting in their keynotes and on their booth were their Analytics tools namely Lumira, Predictive …
Read More »Xcelsius Tech Tip: Overcoming Checkbox Shortcomings
The checkbox is one of the most common UI elements that allow its users to have binary choices and it is available out-of-the-box in Xcelsius/SAP Dashboards. However, the Xcelsius component is limited due to the inability to control the selection or reset to its default state in run-time programmatically. In …
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