Troubleshooting Tips for Xcelsius: Using Snapshot

by Ryan Goodman

Here is the situation…You build your Excel logic, import into Xcelsius, bind all of your components, hit Preview for the instant gratification Xcelsius brings, and your model does not work right. With many dependencies between Xcelsius component bindings and underlying Excel logic, it could be a nightmare to reverse engineer your model just to find that a VLOOKUP is formatted wrong, or your combo box is inserting into the wrong cell.

Here is a little trick of the trade for troubleshooting your model using a feature inside of Xcelsius called snapshot. When you hit preview, navigate to the portion of your dashboard where your error occurs. While in preview mode go to File>Snapshot>Back to Excel. You will then name your Excel file (do not overwrite your original) and save it to your local hard drive. This Excel file will show the state of your model at the given point in time while you were in preview mode. This means all of your insert-in rows, logic, connectors, etc will have executed, and the Excel snapshot will show you what the underlying spreadsheet looks like. Since you should know your spreadsheet, you can quickly look to see if you inserted into an incorrect cell (this is where color coding would have saved you time), or if a formula is generating an error.
As you may or may not know, when you are using Xcelsius you are binding to a copy of your original spreadsheet that you imported. In other words, your XLF is a combination of Xcelsius configured components and your imported spreadsheet snapshot. This is why making changes to the original XLS will not be reflected in your XLF automatically.
Hope this helps!