Project Management Mobile Dashboard
A few months ago I came across an interesting project management dashboard mockup by a UX designer named Becca Schmidt. I contacted her and asked if I could implement her design using SAP dashboards. I was particularly interested in trying to build it for mobile since it really looked like an iPad app to me. Read on to see how I implemented her mockup displayed below..
SAP Dashboards for Mobile
I've been working on converting some existing dashboards and building new ones for SP5 to display in the MoBI app. So far I've been able to get pretty far, but I am finding that I need to layer objects differently and mouse-overs work differently since they appear on top of everything and you can't see values in the bottom layers if you are stacking charts. Here is a screenshot from the iPad of my 'Infographics Dashboard' conversion.
Keep posted as I continue to develop for mobile and I will share some of my tips and tricks. I've already been able to create a dynamic sales funnel, so I'm pleased by that, but disappointed that there is no XY or Bubble Chart. I also miss the spreadsheet component, which gave me the ability to fine-tune larger visual displays with a single component (instead of numerous shapes and text boxes).
- Josh
Stephen Few / Perceptual Edge Contest Submission (Part 1)
This is one of my submissions for Stephen Few's recent dashboard contest. The back-end isn't as well documented as I normally would design, but I didn't have a lot of time with the two entries. By far, this is my less favorite of the two. Feel free to download the source files and let me know if you would have done things differently. The other issue that I have with this dashboard is that the legend moves around depending on the scale. This can be a problem when mixing text boxes with other components. The easy answer would be to embed it in an HTML page with fixed width + height.
Read on for more details...
Xcelsius Tag Cloud
I have been thinking about creating a tag cloud in Xcelsius for some time. I had tried the Web 2.0 add-on, but it was never officially released for production and I found it to be very buggy. So the only thing left to do would be to create my own.
To make sure that this would work properly, I stuck with proven components. Ron Keler from BIHappyBlog.com has taught me about EIC connectivity as part of our latest portal integration project and that seemed like the easiest way to accomplish the tag cloud functionality.
Read on for more details...
Dynamic Breadcrumbs in Xcelsius
The Centigon's Essentials Bundle is getting an upgrade very soon, so I wanted to post my trick for building dynamic breadcrumbs. The Input Manager component allows me to target multiple inputs to a single cell, and builds a complete list of inputs in any order. I then use push buttons to overwrite the input range without the value I'm looking to remove. I've used this component in a large dashboard implementation and it has performed very well.
Charts with Breakfast
I have a pile of chart examples from the WSJ that I thought would be fun to replicate. This morning while having my coffee and breakfast, I decided to put a quick template together. This example uses bubble sizes above a column chart to display another measure across the X-Axis (time in this example).
I would say that a combo chart or two small bar/column charts side by side would be more effective, but I could see this style being used in more of an Infographic style presentation.
Replicating Explorer with Xcelsius Pt.1
I've been working with Explorer more lately and I was curious to see if I could replicate the core functionality in Xcelsius. While it's clear that a dashboard would never be as powerful as the stand-alone Explorer tool, I thought that it would be an interesting challenge just to see how close I could get.
As soon as I started I knew that I would really need the Centigon Essentials bundle in or to accomplish the task. The filtered sort is the bulk of the functionality, so that component is critical. The advanced sort will be perfect for sorting the filtered results, and the input manager is really nice for keeping track of drill-paths. Finally I decided to use the background builder for my solid-colored backgrounds with rounded edges instead of using images.
Below is the link to my beta version. I still have a lot of clean-up to do, especially with the charting options, but I wanted to post my progress so far. Please let me know what you think and if there are specific improvements that you would like to see. I will post my XLF on my blog once the project is complete.
Xcelsius Column Chart with Leader Lines
In response to a question on the SAP Community site, I have put together an example that shows how to add leader lines to a column chart. Original SCN Post here.
The following is the image of the SWF output, but read on for the instructions and source files:
Career Path Template (Excel)
Over the past year, I have received a number of inquiries about my original Career Path template in Xcelsius (HERE). Mostly, people have asked for an offline, personal version with the ability to save changes and I've finally found the time to make a version in Excel for all to enjoy. Please let me know if you have any recommendations for future enhancements.
Click the image to download the file:
Xcelsius vs. HTML5 – Square Charts
You may remember that several months back I made square charts using Xcelsius, and you can find that post HERE. Now I've used a similar methodology to create them in HTML5. Here I started with a stacked bar chart, and just created 10 rows of data with 20 columns. One column for each the positive/negative space of each box.
If the animation is over the top, that is easy enough to turn off, but that is something that I couldn't do in Xcelsius so I wanted to highlight it here. Ultimately the HTML5 is less of a burden to recreate, but still requires some manipulation in either the Webi feeding the data, the underlying data source, or within the JavaScript. Please let me know what you think.