Free Mr. Excel ebook

Microsoft Excel is a major part of SAP Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius) and to build advanced dashboard you need some proper Excel knowledge. Today I was browsing for some info on a few Excel formulas when I came up to this Mr. Excel site, offering a free 900+ pages best practices book on Excel called Learn Excel 97-2007 from Mr. Excel: 377 Excel Mysteries Solved!. The video below shows some of the tips & tricks that are covered in the book.

The ebook is in low resolution so it is good enough to use as a reference guide to take with you on your laptop or iPad. Download it here (no login/registration required!). You can get the printed version here.

Powerpoint, Xcelsius and Twitter DIY

A few weeks ago Timo Elliot (SAP BusinessObjects) launched his free PowerPoint Twitter Tools on his SAP web 2.0 blog. With these tools you are able to integrate Twitter in you presentations and use it i.e. to receive live feedback during your presentation. Lots of updates and improvements have been published since then and the high number of positive comments (on Twitter) confirm what a great idea this is.

A drawback of the tool is that you can’t configure the layout yourself. Also there is a SAP logo on every slide plus the e-mail address of the author. I like SAP but I think it is a bad thing to stuff your slides with logo’s. Also, why would your audience care?

So, let’s build a custom Twitter tool for PowerPoint ourselves, step-by-step.

Requirements:
- A copy of Xcelsius Engage or Xcelsius Engage Server (get a free 30-day trial here);
- MS Excel;
- MS Powerpoint.

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