Xcelsius: 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.

[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”static” fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://hackingsap.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/plusminhackingsapcom.swf” width=”500″ targetclass=”flashmovie”]

[/kml_flashembed]

Read More