SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards
Bye bye Xcelsius, Hello SAP Crystal Solutions?
Last week SAP introduced a new product name for its reporting and dashboarding tooling portfolio: SAP Crystal Solutions. Unfortunately the Xcelsius brand name will completely disappear. Xcelsius Present will be SAP Crystal Presentation Design and Xcelsius Engage should be called SAP Crystal Dashboard Design Personal Edition from now on.
Uh right. Why didn’t they just name it SAP Crystal Xcelsius?
In the table below an overview of the old and new names is shown:
Old Name |
New Name |
| Crystal Reports | SAP Crystal Reports |
| Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 | SAP Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 |
| Crystal Reports for Eclipse | SAP Crystal Reports for Eclipse |
| Crystal Reports Viewer | SAP Crystal Reports viewer |
| Crystal Reports Server | SAP Crystal Reports Server |
| Crystal Reports Visual Advantage | SAP Crystal Reports Dashboard Design package |
| Crystal Reports Developer Advantage | SAP Crystal Reports runtime server license |
| Xcelsius Present | SAP Crystal Presentation Design |
| Xcelsius Engage | SAP Crystal Dashboard Design, personal edition |
Get more information from this blog.
Posted in: SAP, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, XcelsiusXcelsius: Using the Push Button for data input
Xcelsius is a great tool to build interactive what-if scenarios based on MS Excel models. We recently got a request to build such a dashboard and one of the user interface requirements was that the user should be able to change a value by clicking something like a +/- button. Clicking the plus had to increase the value with 1, and clicking the min had to decrease it with 1.
Luckily, Xcelsius provides us the Spinner component. This would have been a good and easy solution, if another 
requirement wouldn’t have been that the dashboard had to be used on a (multi)touch screen. Touch means big buttons for user input and as you can see on the right, the Spinner component is way too detailed. So we needed something else to do the job.
To solve this we used the new Push Button components. The Push Button simply does what its name says and pushes a value from a source cell to a destination cell. To solve our little problem we used two of these Push Buttons and some basic MS Excel logic.
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Posted in: DIY, Knowledge sharing, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, XcelsiusMore HTG from SAP: Setting up authorization for Xcelsius in SAP BW
SAP really is on a roll this month, publishing just another how-to guide on Xcelsius and SAP BW. This time the HTG covers the creation of authorization objects/roles that are required to view/create/change/deploy Xcelsius dashboards. This is now possible with the new authorization object for Xcelsius dashboards: “S_RS_XCLS”.
You can get this HTG here.
Posted in: Knowledge sharing, SAP, SAP BusinessObjects, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP BW, XcelsiusMore HTG from SAP: Xcelsius transports in SAP BW
As mentioned in the previous post, with the new SAP BW integration in Xcelsius (Xcelsius 2008 sp2 or higher) we now have the possibility to use some features of SAP BW directly. We can now publish a Xcelsius dashboard back to the BW system and store it as an object (of type XCLS) in the BW system. These XCLS-objects could be transported to different system in the landscape, in the same way as any other standard BW objects (InfoCube, DataStore Objects etc).
SAP published a how-to guide on this subject. Get it here.
Posted in: Knowledge sharing, SAP, SAP BusinessObjects, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP BW, XcelsiusXcelsius/SAP BW direct connection HTG
With the Xcelsius 2008 sp2 release last year SAP now offers a direct data connection between Xcelsius and SAP BW queries. This is a huge improvement knowing that until this release we needed the BusinessObjects Enterprise, the Universe and QAAWS or Live Office to get our data from SAP BW into Xcelsius dashboards.
SAP published a nice how-to guide, including all pre-requisites needed to setup a connection, a list of BEx query features that do or do not work in Xcelsius and lots of tips and best practices. A must read!
Get it here.
Posted in: Knowledge sharing, SAP, SAP BusinessObjects, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP BW, Xcelsius
