Dashboard Design and Deployment Best Practices with CX: Part 3- Finalize and Connect your Dashboard

by Ryan Goodman

Follow Excel best practices
Now that you are transitioning from your mockup toward your final production dashboard, you will want to start incorporating some Excel best practices designed specifically for use with Xcelsius. These best practices will help you couple your excel based model with live data. Excel best practices will allow you to scale your dashboard as you add and remove metrics. Click here to view the Excel best practices whitepaper.

Utilize summarized data
Though it has not been stressed through the other best practices, connectivity is just as important as the visual dashboard itself. I many cases, the data will originate from a database or warehouse. When building a connected dashboard with Crystal Xcelsius, it is extremely important that the data streamed to the Xcelsius dashboard is summarized. While Xcelsius can do some calculating and summarization during runtime within the SWF, it is best to utilize the web services or reporting tools to do the heavy lifting (calculations and summarization). While the volume of data, complexity of calculations, and refresh frequency can dictate which connectivity method is used, it is important to understand that you want the final range of values streamed to the dashboard to be summarized as close as possible to the information you will visualize.
To ensure you can visualize all of the needed information, there are several ways to summarize the data:

• Use parameterized queries to stream data to the dashboard based on the end users’ selections
• Use reporting tools like Crystal Reports or MS Reporting Services to do the heavy calculations and summarization. Xcelsius supports both of these solutions as data sources.