2011 BOUC in Orlando
Wow, the dust sure gets thick when there isn’t any movement. Well I am to blame for that. I hope this is the start of a rekindled relationship with my blog and to any followers that remain.
I wanted to let you know that I will be speaking at the 2011 BOUC conference but not in Crystal Reports. I will be presenting a case study on how Dell is using Xcelsius Dashboards as part of their overall HR self-service portal. The session is 4009 #582. That is Tuesday, October 11th from 2:45 to 3:45. It has some theory and some technical.
Dell you say? Yes, in April of this of this year I left Pepsi and joined Dell. That also meant a move from Dallas to Austin. The question that usually follows “But what about Dave?!” I am happy to report that Dave is doing just fine without me sitting arm’s length away.
I will also be interviewed Monday, Oct. 10 12:30-1 by ASUGNews Studio to talk about ASUG Influence, Crystal Reports Influence, the partnership between ASUG and SAP and how this has directly affected Crystal Reports product development.
Update 10/3/2011: Pre-Conference Sessions have been cancelled. If you were registered you will be contacted by ASUG HQ shortly.
If you have not made up your mind about going watch this short video. Why Attend ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference?
More information can be found at events.asug.com/businessobjects
See you in Orlando!
ASUG DFW Local User Group Meeting Feb 18, 2011
ASUG Texas-Dallas/Fort Worth Chapter Meeting
Date: Friday, February 18, 2011
Time: 8:00 a.m – 4:00 p.m. CST
Location: Plano Centre
2000 East Spring Creek Parkway
Plano, TX 75074
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Register today for the ASUG Texas-Dallas/Fort Worth Chapter meeting on Friday, February 18, 2011. Don’t miss your chance to learn from the real experience of ASUG members in your area at this educational and networking event included in your ASUG membership benefits.
Even if you are currently not an ASUG member or thinking of becoming one we would love to have you attend to see some of the benefits of membership. No one will be turned away.
Non-ASUG Members Register by Emailing brian.durning@pepsico.com
Thanks to our generous sponsors, there is no cost for our Chapter to host this event. Continental Breakfast and full lunch will be served. Our sponsors include:
Platinum Level
F5 Networks
Fusion Consulting
Sigma Business Solutions
Gold Level
The Abreon Group
Innowera
ProcessWeaver
Silver Level
Simplifying-IT
Door prizes: 2 $200 gift cards to Best Buy, an iPad and iPod Touch, $250 Gift Card from the DFW Local Board and more.
Click here to review the full agenda. Feel free to forward this to others and encourage people to sign up online to attend this event!
DFW Local User Group Agenda Feb 18, 2011
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8:15 am – 9:00 am |
Registration, Coffee, and Vendor Fair |
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9:00 am– |
ASUG Chapter Update and Introductions – (Main Room) An update on what’s |
Blake Whitaker, Bell Helicopter ASUG Chapter Chair |
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9:40 am – |
Keynote – SAP Discover how SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance (SAP HANA), a flexible, Stuart Stuart joined Business Objects in 1999 and became
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Room TBD |
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This meeting will |
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TRACK 1 – SAP Productivity Tools |
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TRACK 2 – ECC Functional |
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TRACK 3 – SAP Business Intelligence / SAP BusinessObjects |
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TRACK 4 – Technical & Mobility |
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TRACK 5 – Change Management & End User Training |
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10:05 am – |
Move to Break-out Rooms (10 minutes) |
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10:15 am – |
Morning Breakout Session 1 |
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Improving SAP’s UI Can Help Ensure User Adoption and Compliance It is no secret that SAP is typically Mark Mark has over 17 years of business and technical |
Room TBD |
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Multi-Carrier In our session you Learn how to: · Streamline your · · · Martin Garza – Sales Director, North America Sales & Customer Operations, ProcessWeaver Martin Garza is Sales Director, North America Sales and |
Room TBD |
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OLTP Universe Design A universe for an Dennis Dennis has been developing universes for Oracle |
Room TBD |
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SAP ERP and BW Archiving Solutions, Process, Major Challenges, Roland Professional Accountant of over 30 years with 18 |
Room TBD |
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Power In Numbers – Change Leveraging the power of change networks / power Michele Michele Snead is a change management / education |
Room |
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11:05am – |
Break (10 minutes) |
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11:15 am – 12:05 pm |
Morning Breakout Session 2 |
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Simplifying SAP Data Management using Excel Process Runner is
Mickey Mickey Shah is the founder and chief solution
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Room |
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BNSF Railway Company’s Review a case study on
Cynthia Security & Controls, BNSF Railway Cynthia McConathy is the Director of SAP Security &
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Room TBD |
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A Comprehensive Guide to This session will provide you what you need to know to get started Ginger Gatling – SAP Solution Management, SAP Labs, Ginger is a Senior Solution Manager with SAP focusing on
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Room TBD |
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Automation and Many IT processes for the SAP environment are complex and costly. Adventier
Jean-Paul Jean-Paul (JP) Eric Eric Kang is a frequent speaker in the SAP community. Eric is CEO of Adventier, a technology and
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Room TBD |
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Best Practices for In this session, learn Steve Over the last 14 years, Steve has designed,
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Room |
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12:05 pm – |
Networking lunch |
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12:50 pm – 1:40 pm |
Afternoon Breakout Session 1 |
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ASUG Value Discussion What value are you getting from ASUG? Ginger Luttrell – |
Room TBD |
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Campaigning & Targeting Using SAP CRM TXU Energy completed implementation SAP ECC (6.0) & CRM (5.0) modules in 2009 the first electric utility Scott Scott Evans is the CRM Development Energy. Prior to his role in IT, Scott worked in Marketing and |
Room TBD |
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Enterprise
Southwest Airlines and Fusion will
KarthikVishwa – Practice Karthik is a Practice Director at Fusion Cecil Woodley – Senior Developer, Southwest Airlines Cecil Woodley is a Senior Developer at Southwest |
Room |
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Modern Discover how to get Mike Mr. Schrock, SAP Global Alliance and Business Development |
Room TBD |
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Boost Your SAP ROI with SAP’s FMLA Workbench Over 52% of employers are granting FMLA (Family Key Learning Points: Discover how you can use SAP’s FMLA workbench to complete all tasks Patrick Patrick has 14 |
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1:40 pm – |
Break (10 minutes) |
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1:50 pm – |
Afternoon Breakout Session 2 |
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How to get more out of Learn how you can provide a game changing user and customer experience Jaco Van Eeden – Global SAP Jaco van Eeden the Global SAP and Adobe |
Room TBD
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Leverage the Sales Force Learn how some companies have migrated from Siebel to SAP CRM and have Anand Kumar – Fujitsu Anand Kumar is the director of the SAP CRM practice at |
Room TBD |
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Kaushal |
Room TBD |
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A Discussion on Mobility This session examines Greg Rodgers – Mobility Practice Lead, Diagonal Consulting Greg Rodgers leads the mobility practice for Greg has helped build out four mobile software |
Room TBD |
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2:40 pm – |
Break (10 minutes) |
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2:50 pm – 3:40 pm |
Afternoon Breakout Session 3 |
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Intelligent We will share best practices for introducing automation into your SAP environment and thereby increasing basis Kevin Harbuck – National SAP Marcus Holm – Automation Product Specialist, Cisco Systems As a key developmental partner for SAP, Cisco has |
Room TBD |
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Ensure Success with your Next SAP® Learn how IBM’s application lifecycle challenges during their last upgrade and system Jay Hiremath – Senior Architect, IBM Information Management Jay Hiremath is a senior architect in the IBM Information |
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SAP BI Roadmap and the New SAP BusinessObjects Business Come see the latest Susan Guess – Director, Solution Management, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence, SAP Labs, Susan Guess is She is currently |
Room TBD |
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Transforming the Future Do you think your SAP work is over? It is just starting. Companies are Mauro Okamoto – VP Mauro joined Softtek in 1998 as a SAP |
Room TBD |
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3:40pm – 3:50 pm |
Break (10 minutes) |
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3:50 pm– 4:30 pm |
Closing Comments, Surveys, and |
Blake Whitaker, Bell Helicopter ASUG Chapter Chair |
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4:30 pm – |
Happy Hour / Networking |
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Reporting Remix #3
Here I am at the end of the Reportapalooza journey, a bit melancholy, a bit relieved, but overall better for having done it. It’s hard to believe that the journey began back in mid August and now we are fast approaching Thanksgiving.
Our last task was to blog about one of the Crystal Solutions Products we either did not know or knew little about over a 3 week period. Honestly, I thought there wasn’t much to talk about with Crystal Dashboard Designer (formerly known as Xcelsius) but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I chose it because it was the only product that I knew little about either because I chose not to or did not have the opportunity. Sometimes life’s greatest lessons are those learned through a controlled choice (forced). Now don’t get me wrong, no one twisted my arm and said I had to do anything, all I am saying is that of all the choices I have to make during the day, choosing to learn more about Crystal Dashboard Designer would not have been high on my uncontrolled list.
Like I said in my opening paragraph I am leaving this experience better for having gone through it. I would like to say that I am an accomplished BI Solutions expert and that I can speak well on most SAP BusinessObjects Products. What I have learned through my weeks with Crystal Dashboard Designer is that I still have a lot to learn.
Crystal Dashboard Designer
We are visual beings. We use sight from the time we open our eyes in the morning until the time our head hits the pillow at night. So it should come as no surprise that the things that get our attention are the things that we find visually appealing. I never thought of generating reports as glamorous or sexy, I mean really? It’s a bunch of numbers and some words, a graph or two and maybe a page count with the summaries. Using Crystal Dashboard Designer is the tool that brings sexy back.
Now granted your Dashboard may not get you on the cover of Vogue, but it will get you the attention of CEOs and CIOs within your organization. Here is a tool whose output you can give to these very busy individuals that is portable, interactive, informative and customizable.
I learned that this tool is not just an extension of an Excel Workbook, but a powerful and rich way to attract and interact your user and your data. There is a big and vibrant community both inside and outside of SAP that are enthusiastic about the product and answering your questions. There are numerous partners that have great add-ons for this product that take your presentations to a new level.
I am a little sad that I won’t be getting on conference calls to talk to Mico, Jamie, Jim and David over this shared topic. While this was touted as a competition I feel it was more of a collaboration of friends. We had to balance our already hectic schedules with sometimes near impossible deadlines and technical difficulties. It was the support of my fellow Reportapalooza Experts that I persevered and to them I give thanks.
To my supporters through this journey I want to give special thanks. I know you were cringing towards the end every time you saw another Email from me thinking “what does he want me to vote on now?” Well just one more vote through an Email with a bit.ly attached 
What ever position I finish in I will have still won.
Reporting Remix #2
The weeks seem to be blending into each other. It seems like it was just yesterday when I put up my last post. Well it was a week ago today and this is what I have learned.
Web Service Connection:
I want to say that the more I learn, the less I know. Over the weekend is about the only time I have to work on projects of any sort. So I dedicated this weekend to learning about the connection types I had promised in last week’s blog. I started by creating a new Dashboard and my first Web Service Connection. The first parameter in the dialog box was to enter the WSDL URL? Huh? A WSDL or Web Service Definition Language as I come to understand it is a XML document that defines web services as collections of network endpoints, or ports. This in its simplest form allows communication between the message (request), service (WSDL) and the source. OK, cool so what is this good for?
So out on the internet I went to look for WSDL URL’s and what I found was a service (WSDL) that retrieved the current bid information for an EBay item. So what can I do with this? Well it would be cool for me personally but what about a real business application? That is when I came across the currency converter. Again I asked myself what practical application can I use this new found toy?
I took a break and walked my dogs to let things stew for a while. Then it came to me, how about a Dashboard that helped an international business decide when to buy a particular product or good from a country based upon the exchange rate?
So I went through the relatively simple exercise of creating the Web Service Connection. In the WSDL URL I entered http://www.webservicex.net/CurrencyConvertor.asmx?WSDL and selected import. Voila! OK, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but it was nice.
In the Input values side I selected From Currency and the Read From became active. I bound this to a range of cells in my worksheet. I did this again for the Output Values and bound a similar range next to the Input range.
I won’t bore you with the other details, but instead I will publish my Dashboard this weekend after it’s cleaned up. What I will tell you is that the Dashboard allows my fake business to see where they can buy their fake products the cheapest based on the current exchange rate.
Query as a Web Service (QAAWS)
So when I told you last week that I was going to look into QAAWS I had no idea that it was nearly identical to Web Service Connection. Honestly, I was not trying to cheat and kill two birds with one stone. So I took my dogs for another walk. I realized during my walk that the main and most important difference is that QAAWS is used so that you can talk to your Business Objects environment.
We use QAAWS to populate a Server Health dashboard. This Dashboard was created by my co-workers Tina Robertson and Sridhar Rangabhashyam. She created the code to extract Server Health information from our various BO Environments. Tina Robertson created the Universe and Dashboard. In the end we have a single view of the health of our various BO environments. For those Administrators out there wouldn’t it be nice to look at a dashboard and only have to worry about yellow or red indicators instead of looking at the individual health indicators in every system?
This was accomplished by installing the Service in the BusinessObjects environment and establishing a reference to a BusinessObjects Universe. The URL that is created now becomes the WSDL URL used the values needed for my Query as a Web Service Dashboard connection.
Centigon GMaps
I told you last week that it was a last minute dash to put in a map in my Charity Dashboard challenge. I looked at the various options that are out there and found that Centigon’s GMaps was the easiest to use right out of the box.
I wanted to add some more “WOW” to the functionality of the GMaps but ran out of time. So when I talked with the Founder and CEO Ryan Goodman I told him about some of the things I wanted to but could not because of time. Ryan told me about some of the example Dashboards they have on their website that showcased some of the various solutions they had.
One thing I wanted to do was put the Client information in Rows not a continuous string. Ryan told me that I could use HTML code for a hard coded return to achieve this.
Second, I wanted to either launch a new Dashboard or report. Again, I can imbed either the Open Document call from BusinessObjects or just a simple hyperlink to maybe the Client’s website?
The third thing I talked about was why couldn’t I just use a street address and have GMaps find the coordinates. Ryan paused a moment and said that it already does that. Boy did I feel dumb. I had gone out iTouch Maps and put in several client addresses, got the latitude and longitude and placed this information in to Excel, bound the cell to the map….. You see where I am going. I did all the work that was already built in to the product.
This last topic started me thinking about how I can bring this in to my work and drive business. So for those managers or business analysts out there pay attention. We now have two great tools, Dashboard Designer and GMaps. We can connect to our BusinessObjects environment through QAAWS to retrieve Sales data, we can display the data in GMaps with location pins set with threshold values to visually alert us when conditions are met. You can now look at a map and see if a certain area is affected that might indicate a trend or problem. Personally I think this beats just running a report, creating an alerter, grouping the stores based upon the alerter and then trying to figure out of they are located near each other or in a particular sales area.
All in all it was a productive weekend. The dogs received a lot of fresh air and exercise. I learned that I need to continue to challenge myself outside of work to keep relevant and bring value to what I do and my community.
Reporting Remix #1
At its basic level a Dashboard is a visual presentation of summarized data. A Dashboard becomes dated or irrelevant if you can’t do two things. Keep data current and clearly represent it.
My journey this week ended with a conference call I had with the CEO of Centigon Solutions, Ryan Goodman. Centigon Solutions provided the GMaps Plug-in I used for my Dash for Charity Dashboard (which by the way is really cool). I needed a way to show the location of NPower of Pennsylvania’s clients and information about the diversity in service and budget of that particular client. Over the hour that Ryan spent with me we went over the learning’s I had and he allowed me to ask how-to questions. It’s not often that you get an hour of one on one time with a CEO for which I am truly thankful.
But my week started out with the data question. How can I keep my data fresh thereby keeping my Dashboard a relevant useful tool? I know from the first challenge how much time I spent scouring the internet collecting data, so why waste that time by not establishing a connection to it so that when and if the data changes my Dashboard can automatically change as well?
So I opened my Charity Dashboard and went to the Data Manager found under Data/Connections or the gold double sphere storage icon. Under Add I found 10 connection types available to me. I frantically looked for an old friend called ODBC, but unfortunately it did not exist. So I thought for a second why wouldn’t they have an ODBC connection? Well not everyone has the ODBC driver loaded on their machine so if I had imbedded a Dashboard for my client to use and they did not have the necessary ODBC driver installed any refresh ability would have been lost.
So with that revelation I better understood and appreciated the other connection types available. I am familiar with XML data and the Crystal Reports Data Consumer as I had used that for one of my Video challenges. But what about the others? When and how would I use them? I hear at work that we use Query as a Web Service for our Dashboard so that is one option I am going to explore. The other that I thought I can do at home would be the Web Service Connection. Now I use the internet but
when it comes to anything other than typing a URL I’m lost.
So here I am at the end of the week with more questions than answers. What is a WSDL? What is a WEB Service URL? Is that any different that the URL I type into the address bar of my Browser? How can I update the NPower of Pennsylvania Dashboard so that they can use it and show current monthly data without having to manually update data?
So here is what I promise to do by the next time we meet next week. I will understand and connect to Query as a WEB Service, I will also understand and connect to a WEB Service somewhere out there. Maybe one of these two types of connections will enable me to update my Charity Dashboard? And last but not least some cool tips and tricks I will have learned from Centigon Solutions.
NPower PA enabling Nonprofits through technology
For the fourth journey we the five Reportapalooza experts were asked to choose a Nonprofit organization from among several that wanted to have a Dashboard created for them. As I read through the summaries I was struck by one in particular because the idea of a nonprofit for nonprofit had never occurred to me.
So began my fourth journey and my relationship with the people of NPower of Pennsylvania. A couple of days after my selection I was happy to find that NPower had accepted me to represent them in this challenge. I met with Tony and Jaclyn via phone where we talked about ourselves, our companies and our vision for this Dashboard. I was impressed by them and the work that both they and NPower do for nonprofits.
Tony and Jaclyn already had an idea of the message but did not know enough about the tool to provide specifics. I on the other hand I knew the tool but not the message. We brainstormed some ideas and at the end of our meeting I promised them a rough outline of the Dashboard in a couple of days.
So I got right to work and visited NPower PA’s website. I was impressed and awe struck by the content and the stories that unfolded for me. Before I had realized it I found I had been browsing their website for a couple of hours. So I found more information about what Tony and Jaclyn wanted to represent in the Dashboard.
Since they work in Pennsylvania and I work in Texas I needed to be able to quickly show them my interpretation of what I understood to be their vision. Crystal Dashboard design allowed me to do that. I got right to work and created a quick and rough Dashboard with 3 tabs and added some components such as text boxes, charts, fisheye menus and pictures. Nothing fancy here, but it allowed for great dialog the next time I spoke with Tony and Jaclyn.
I sent Tony and Jaclyn the SWF and explained how they can view it through a browser. During our next phone call we were able to use this file as a reference for further brainstorming. I was so glad that they knew what they wanted and more over what they did not want. By the end of our second phone call we had worked out the layout and details of the Dashboard.
Over the next couple of weeks I worked on the Dashboard and sent Tony and Jaclyn updated SWF files to show them my progress. The week of the due date I received the last of the metrics from Jaclyn and links to pictures of the actual students in their ITWorks program.
I would love to say at this point there were no problems from my side, but there were. As with all things that you use for the first time there are bound to be issues. I used the GMap Plugin component from Centigon Solutions for the first time. It is a great tool and did exactly what I needed it to do. I quickly learned that the API key needed to display the map was specific to the website in which the Dashboard was being displayed.
So that wasn’t my only problem. There were a couple of changes that needed to be made Monday morning. I did them from work but what I failed to remember was that the link to the objects used in my Dashboard only existed on my home computer. You may think that was enough but what really made this all challenging was the fact that I had the Dashboard file at home.
So here it is Monday morning at work. My workday has started in a traditional Monday fashion. My good friend and co-worker Dave Rathbun is at SAP TechEd so I get to field his support questions. We had a reporting failure Monday morning so we are flooded with angry customers. I have back to back meetings all morning. My Dashboard file is at home along with all the pictures and the announcement for voting is going live this morning. No problem
I managed to get the Dashboard corrected and done with the help of NPower and White Rhino in time for the announcement. White Rhino is the technical team behind Reportapalooza.
All in all it was a great personal experience for me. I have a greater appreciation for the work that NPower does by enabling other nonprofits do the great work that needs to be done for our communities. I wish Tony and Jaclyn continued success in their endeavors and hope to keep in contact with them over the years.
And that’s a wrap……
As you know we were tasked with creating two short Crystal Reports how-to videos. I was not apprehensive about my topics, it was the fact that I had to record and edit my own video that had me worried. I had never used any video editing software; in fact the only thing that comes close is screen capturing with Snag It.
The week got off to a bad start as I was confused about which were my two how-to selections. Now you wouldn’t think that was hard since I picked the topics myself, but somehow I managed to mess that up. It was Tuesday evening by the time I realized I had been working on the wrong topics. So there I was two days in to a five day event with nothing to show for it.
With Mountain Dew in hand I started with the default settings in Snag It to capture the video and began my test run. I told myself that my test run would just be to see what the video capture looked like. I started recording me moving the pointer around the screen, opening menus, pretending to select something. Well that was enough recorded video, now to see what it looked like.
Lesson one, the default settings include audio. Now realize it is 1 AM Wednesday morning, I am a little stressed and a little tired and I’m alone. As I start to watch the video I realize that the microphone is on and is really good. It can pick up the sound of me moving the mouse. Soon I hear myself clear my throat and then take a drink of Mountain Dew. Next is the sound of me burping. Not a polite in the restaurant kind of burp, but the one reserved for teenagers in a burping competition. After all I’m alone who was going to hear it? Duh!
Next is me cursing myself because I opened the wrong menu item, then I admonish myself for doing so. That’s when Ivan my dog came over to see if he can help. So with a voice one would use to speak to a new born I say “Who’s a good boy, who’s a good boy? Daddy loves you but I have to get back to work.”
Lesson two, have a script ready. There is nothing more wasteful then recording without a script. I know what I am doing but it is completely different when you are recording your every move. So after a number of not so good recordings I decided to make a script and tape it next to the monitor. This way I could create a polished video that needed a limited amount of editing. I also realize that Snag It won’t give me the video quality I need so I end up using Jing.
Lesson three, halfway through the contest is not the time to choose and learn your video editing tool. I had several video editing software programs already installed. I know that seems like a lot but they were bundled with applications to support devices like my camera or scanner. I had never used them so I opened the first one I found, of course it had to install an update which in turn made me reboot. After the reboot I opened the application again and watched a quick how-to video. Wow they make it look so easy, I feel so silly for worrying about the editing process. Wrong, I had plenty to worry about.
Lesson four, don’t fix what isn’t broke. My laptop and I were very happy prior to this week. All applications were compatible, no one complained about out of date drivers, everything was supported, everything was harmonious. That is until the first video editing software update and that is when the dance began.
The dance I speak of is launch, update, reboot, launch, error, Google, patch, reboot, launch. I did this dance part of Wednesday morning and most of Thursday evening in between video editing/learning. I should place more emphasis on the learning. The software I finally ending up using for editing was Camtasia. It was fairly straight forward and had some very easy drag and drop features along with intuitive right click menu options.
Lesson five, yes you do sound like that! My first video is now edited but needs the narrative. So how hard can that be? It’s just five minutes of me talking about what I am doing on screen. My first of several failed attempts was to create the narrative in one take. An hour in to making a 4 minute narrative I realize that I am going to have to make this narrative in pieces and splice it together. I will just have to learn how to splice voice recordings on top of everything I had to learn.
So here we are, Friday evening and the two videos are due by midnight. I have one video with no narrative and I haven’t started the second. The final touch on the first video was adding ABBA’s Dancing Queen to the intro. I wanted to tie in the whole Reportapalooza theme to the videos I was making. If you don’t recognize the second song for the beginner video it is ABBA’s Should I Laugh or Cry.
The reason I chose that song was that it was Saturday morning, I had been up since Friday morning and was at the point where I was asking myself should I laugh or cry when the second video had a problem I could not fix.
All in all it was a good week in which I proved to myself that I am not too old to learn something new and that being alone doesn’t mean you are alone in this electronic age. My new webcam that came with the microphone was on during this entire week without my knowledge so who knows if or where I was streaming live video?
The dust has settled for the Dashboard Challenge
These past two weeks have been crazy. We found out Sunday afternoon Aug 22 what Dashboard we were going to create. Mine was the Internet Usage Dashboard and it was due by Aug 27. Small problem was that I had already planned a vacation and was leaving Aug 26. Oh, and I work during the day.
In order to successfully build a dashboard you have to brainstorm and make a rough draft on paper. You need to know your data to generate the general outline, what components will be placed where. Where will the User interact, what dials, drill-downs, and buttons are you going to use. I did none of that.
From the start my very flawed strategy was to go and see what kind of data is available because I thought that would help drive the design. Wrong again, there is so much statistical data out on the Web about the Web that it only confused me more. So I finally sat down and thought what data is available and what is the cool and fun statistics that I want to share. I found internet usage statistics for Antarctica. So does that mean that Penguins are surfing the net?
I wanted my entry page to have some splash, but what kind of splash can you make with yearly statistics? I started to browse the components to see what jumped out at me. It wasn’t until I got to the maps that my idea started to come together for both the Dashboard and what data I wanted to find.
I found some statistics by Continent, then by Country/State. I was happy but that did not last long when I started to put the data together with the map components. Dashboard data needs to be in contiguous rows with the first column being the identifier. So I created two tabs of Excel data, one for Continents and the other for Country/State.
This is where you need to have the tissues ready for this sad paragraph. I have learned that not everyone that collects and reports statistical information agrees on what area a Continent covers. Some blur the line between Regions and Continents. Once I sorted that layer out I had to align the Continent key on the Dashboard with those in my data. Next was to place the Country/State in their respective Continent again according to the Dashboard map. When you have a white area on a Dashboard map it means the map key did not match a row of data. I spent 10 hours mapping and rearranging data so that map keys and data keys matched. Did you know that China is not just China, but Hong Kong and Macao? Or how many countries in Africa have changed names, split or changes names and split? Don’t get me started on Russia.
So now all the data is mapped but I still don’t have any splash. So I start to explore Charts, but again what data is interesting? I finally decided that the Charts would contain data that when I saw I said “Really?” Information like what are people really doing on their cell phone? Is Google really the number one search site?
When I was nearly done I showed it to my Mom and she said “So how does this work?” I was stunned; here I am almost finished when I completely forgot why I was creating this Dashboard. That was to introduce and showcase the Crystal Dashboard tool. So I spent the next couple of hours making Help icons and associating them with Label boxes that would guide the new User or potential buyer through the Dashboard and what the tool was about.
When I was done I went back to my Mom and said here is the Dashboard and watched her interact. We did not talk as she read the introduction page and started to explore. She navigated from the Global map to the Continental maps. Clicked on countries, used the Fisheye menu, read data, printed a page and reset the Dashboard a couple of times. I was happy.
So I asked my Mom the first time User how was her experience. She first told me all the obligatory Mom stuff like “I’m so proud of you”, “You’re so smart” then we got down to business. She pointed out all of the misspelled words, the grammar and punctuation. She pointed out things that did not make sense or saw numbers that had no label. I wasn’t feeling so smart at this point.
In the end I felt I did a pretty good job considering the time line, the data and my previous exposure/experience with Crystal Dashboards. This was my first Dashboard I have created from scratch outside of the classroom. I have modified others but never created from scratch.
I really enjoyed creating this Dashboard for everyone. I hope you enjoy interacting with it. Our individual XLF files should be available after the Labor Day weekend on the Reportapalooza site. I will also post mine here over this weekend. Have a happy and safe Labor Day weekend.
Week two of Reportapalooza starts
Well the week got of to a running start. We were Emailed Sunday what our Dashboard assignments were. Mine is the Internet Dashboard. I feel the pressure because this is the Dashboard idea that received the most votes.
So here is what is going on behind the scenes. We are not provided the data so we have had to go look for statistical information. I think it is kind of ironic that I have to use the Internet to create a Dashboard about the Internet. One problem I have is that I am a bit scattered in thinking so it takes me a little while to focus. First I had to decide on the scope of material I would gather be it Global or North America? Then what is the subset of information that I think would be interesting to present? Is it what Browser we are using? How are we browsing? What device are we using to browse? Do I want current information or do I want to show a trend?
So here we are Wednesday and most of the Dashboard is coming together. I have been up until 2 or 3 every night working on this Dashboard because I have had two challenges. The first is a steep learning curve. I have taken an Xcelsius class before and even built a simple dashboard, but that was nearly a year ago. In this case if you don’t use it, you will loose it and I did.
The biggest of the two challenges was the data. I wanted to make sure that I had consistency across data points such as yearly data. I would get information on topic a from 2007 – 2010 but topic B only had data from 200 – 2006. I would also find that Regional information was not grouped the same. For example North America, Central America and South America. Each data source grouped the countries within each differently. Then I had to align the data I gathered with the maps in Xcelsius.
Our Dashboards are due Friday evening. I will be turning mine in Friday morning because I am catching a flight back to California for a class reunion. I will post a picture here of the Dashboard Friday. On Monday you be able to actually interact with the Dashboard on the Reportapalooza website.