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.

We can use the Twitter search API to find out how to import the tweets via XML maps. According to this page we need the following url to receive the 10 most recent tweets about Apple:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=Apple&rpp=10

Now we go to the spreadsheet area in Xcelsius to import this XML. Go to the Develop tab and choose Import. If you don’t have a Developer tab, close Xcelsius and open Excel. Go to Excel Options and enable “Show Developer tab in the Ribbon”. Quit Excel and restart Xcelsius.

Past the above url and import the data in the spreadsheet. Make sure you do not put the data in the upper cells of the spreadsheet as we need them later on, so use i.e. cell A10. Your setup should now look something like this:

Actually, for our Twitter tool we will only need the following fields/columns:
ns1: name (Name of the author)
ns1: uri (Link to the author profile)
ns1: title (Tweet)
href (Link to the tweet and link to the profile image of the author)

Next we have to add this connection in the Data Manager. Add an Excel XML map connection and you will see that Xcelsius already recognizes the connection we just made.

In the Usage tab, enable Refresh On Load and adjust Refresh Every to 1 minute. Bind the Trigger Cell to cell A2 and select “When Value Changes”.

We want to be able to change the search term, so we need to make a variable of the XML Data URL in the Definition tab. Bind this field to cell A5.

Go to the spreadsheet and put the following values in the cells:
A1: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=
A2: Apple
A3: &rpp=10
A5: =CONCATENATE(A1,A2,A3)

I like to highlight the cells with variables yellow and the cells with Excel formulas green, just for clarity.

As you can see in the spreadsheet area the data is presented in a somewhat hierarchical way, with lots of empty cells. But, when running the dashboard this actually is not the case and all cells will be filled with data. To demonstrate this you can use the Spreadsheet Table component. Bind the display data to the first 4 rows below the XML map field headers. Hit the Preview button and you’ll see that the href-column gives us 2 links for each tweet, placed in 2 cells below each other. We should keep this in mind! Now delete the Spreadsheet Table component.

Add an Input Text component to the canvas and bind this to cell A2. With this field the user can change the search term.

Next I use the Image component to add an image of a text balloon to the canvas. Paste a label component on the text balloon and bind it to cell O11 (text of the first Tweet). Next add an URL Button component to the canvas and also place it on top of the text balloon. Bind it to cell M11 (url of the tweet). Erase the label value in the Properties pane and in the Appearance tab deselect “Show Button Background”.

Finally we have to add the name and profile image of the tweet author. Add the Slide Show Component to the canvas and bind it to cell M12 (profile image location, always one cell below the url of the tweet, remember?).

Next add another Label Component and bind it to cell V11 (author name). Now we only have to add another URL Button component and past it over the profile image. Bind it to cell W11 (url of author profile).

Now it is time to test our dashboard! Hit Preview.

So that’s how it works. You can embed the swf-file into Powerpoint or place it wherever you want.
Download the source files here (via Pay with a Tweet). Have fun!

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://hackingsap.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/twitter.swf” height=”450″ width=”600″ /]

HackingSAP.com - Nov 29, 2009 | DIY, Featured, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, Xcelsius
Tagged | DIY, Excel, Flash, PowerPoint, SAP Crystal Dashboard Design, SCDD, Twitter, Xcelsius, XML