What is a Dashboard?

by Ryan Goodman

What is a Dashboard? A Simple Definition
A dashboard in simple terms is a summarized visual representation of critical information required to make business decisions. This visual representation is typically presented on a computer screen as collection of charts, tables and other visuals that display trends, statistics, and measures.

We will compare a business dashboard to the dashboard in your car. The gauges in your vehicle show you a real time performance: How fast your going, how much gas you have left, the oil temperature, etc. The collective gauge cluster in your vehicle allows you to quickly asses how your car is performing while you drive. In essence, a business dashboard should serve the same general purpose: presenting the most current performance measures available for your to drive your business.

Why is a Dashboard Valuable?
A dashboard is valuable to any person within an organization who requires summarized information to make business decisions. This value is derived from time savings on multiple fronts:
- The time savings to gather, aggregate, and present all necessary information.
- The time savings for the business person to consume, digest, and make decisions.
There are also several benefits to dashboard solutions offered by software vendors, but they hinge on other aspects related to IT, which we will not dive into for this article.

So in Summary...
- Dashboards server to present a holistic view of one or multiple facets of your business: primarily related to performance.
- Dashboards should enable a business person to quickly assimilate to the information presented to make informed decisions quickly
- Dashboards streamline the process for gathering and manually aggregating data into a coherent presentation.

Xcelsius Salesforce.com Widgets in Business 2.0 Magazine

by Ryan Goodman

Before boarding a plane to head over to Europe, I purchased my usual Business 2.0 magazine (April 2007) and found an interesting article on widgets. This article reported recent advancements in desktop widgets in the enterprise space. To my delight, they had a great image of an Xcelsius generated revenue tracker widget designed for Salesforce.com. I sat back and asked myself one question... At what point will this desktop widget craze materialize into something valuable or just roll up into the next big thing: Rich Internet Applications on the desktop?

Desktop widgets were the first iteration of what Adobe and other industry players have coined rich internet applications. It was the combination of Yahoo widgets and Apple desktop that propelled this cool technology into a desktop widget craze, as seen in Business 2.0, Wall Street Journal, and other publications. The draw for end users is the demand for a streamlined, customized, and aesthetically pleasing mini application that exists outside of the browser. There were three descriptors missing in the previous sentence that in many cases still restrict widgets from really catching fire.

1. A strong security model- While existing frameworks are wonderful in displaying and rendering content, they are not designed to address security to satisfy enterprise requirements.
2. Customizable content- While the technology is cool, without an ability to view customized content, widgets will always be perceived as desktop “toys.”
3. A solid monetization strategy- It seems the path of least resistance is to make widgets free, and concentrate on using widgets as a value-add for existing software platforms, and applications.

The article in Business 2.0 indicates that enteprise software vendors are taking a stab at desktop widgets.

Calendar Date Formatting in Xcelsius

by Ryan Goodman

If you are working with dates within a connected Xcelsius dashboard, you can run into potential issues related to formatting. In most cases, you will require a specific format when you want to pass a date as a parameter to a web service.

Using the calendar component, you can insert and visualize a user defined date. Though you can set the cell format to modify the display of that date, Excel actually stores it using the 1900 date system. This simply means that the date Jan 1, 1900 has a true numeric value of 1, and Jan 1, 2007 has the true numeric value of 39083. The problem at hand is if you bind a web service connector component to a cell that is formatted, it will still use the true numeric value and not the formatted value that you see during runtime. Here is how you can remedy this:

Download the Source Files

1. Bind a calendar component to an insert in cell
2. Use the day, month, and year formulas to extract the individual values into their respective cells
3. Use the concatenate to sting together the day, month, and year in your desired format.