BusinessObjects Xcelsius Enterprise 2008 enables you to transform Excel workbooks into interactive dashboards with the ability to provide interactive what-if analysis. An Xcelsius dashboard provides insight into complex data and delivers confidence to those who will use it to make decisions.

Data is often so complex that workbooks are needed to organize it in a meaningful way. But even with excel workbooks usually the amount of data is so huge and raw that it becomes very difficult to draw conclusions quickly. For example which is easier for most audiences to understand?

A static Excel worksheet?

Or a dashboard created using XCelsius?

The process of creating a dashboard using XCelcius can be distilled into the following steps

Let us start with a simple example where we will be creating a dashboard using some data already present in excel.

Step1: Start XCelsius.

The screenshot above shows the various components used when designing a new dashboard using XCelsius.

Step2: Import an excel document.

In this step we will be importing an existing excel document to be used as the source of data for the dashboard.

Click on Data->Import to import an excel file. As you can see we can also import from other sources including web services and other live data sources, something that we will be covering at a later point.

Select the excel file for use within your dashboard and click OK.

The excel document is now imported within XCelsius and now can be used to draw the dashboard.

Step 3: Add the chart. We will be drawing a line chart for each of the regions that shows the sales for the year 2006. In order to do so drag and drop the line chart control to the canvas.

We now need to set the properties for the chart to read the data from the specific range in the imported spreadsheet.

You can also go to the other tabs in the properties pallete to further set additional behavior such as drill down, appearance etc. We will be looking into this in more detail in subsequent posts.

Click on the preview button to see how the chart looks on the dashboard.

Step 4: Export the dashboard

Goto file export to export the dashboard in either SWF form to be embedded in websites, or in PDF/PPT/Word form. The dashboard can also be exported to BOE for sharing with other users within your organization.