Creating a dashboard for the Olympics Poll Results Challenge in Xcelsius

[Former Member]

It was a great idea from Jason Cao to start a community challenge for Xcelsius. For me, Xcelsius is a really cool software to create dashboards. It’s very easy and intuitive to learn. You can build dashboards on any Excel data, no connections to SAP or SAP BW queries necessary in the first step. 

My result for the challenge looks like this:

 

When you start Xcelsius, you have a blank paper, where you can place your controls everywhere you want. One criteria for good dashboards is clarity. You should be able to see the most important information at a glance. So I divided the paper into three slides with the different working areas. On the first tabstrip I placed 4 window containers on the page. I aligned them manually. More windows are not really recommended. Then I placed in each window a chart type. I’ve chosen two different types, just to show the possibilities.

Each window can have its own title. I ordered the windows in a way, that bar charts are at the top and stacked bar charts at the bottom.

The basic layout is

I solved the different formatting of the charts with exception formatting. I say sorry in advance, I have a german version of XCelsius only. What you see is the property window of the chart bar. And I activated warning messages and chose by value. Then I chose new colours representing gold, silver and bronze medals for the three top values. All other values got colour light blue.

The tricky part is in Chart  2 where “Others” is absolutely the highest value. But  of course “Others” should not get gold colour. My solution with exception formatting is: I made the same settings as in the first bar chart, but had to add another row for “others” value.

Page “Simulation” is done fairly simple.

I put a bar chart at the right. At the left side I placed a slider for each sports. The sliders where connected to the Excel cells with the corresponding values. I set manual upper and border margins. So if you turn the slider the value will change. But because the chart has the same data, the chart will change too. It’s a bit of magic....The next picture explains how the magic works:

On the “info” page I just put a calendar, my picture and some URL buttons to show further possibilities of Xcelsius.

As you can see it's really easy to create impressive dashboards with XCelsius.