Crystal Xcelsius for Dummies

by Michael Alexander

As the fastest growing dashboarding solution on the market, Xcelsius is an intuitive stand-alone Windows application that enables Excel users to transform the contents of an ordinary Excel spreadsheet... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471779105
• ISBN13: 9780471779100
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: For Dummies
• Length: 294 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Good Book for Starters

This is a very good resource for beginners, however its not an ideal Reference book while working on Xcelsius. Buy this book, if you are new to xcelsius. The chapters are very well organized and will help you get started easily. [...

Great book

I liked this book a lot. I enjoyed the writing and even tough it was a Dummies book, it contained all the information that I needed to be able to get started mastering Crystal Xcelsius.

Xcelsius for Dummies

After being assigned to produce Dashboards for our company, I tried to read and understand the manual. I saw the Crystal Xcelsius for Dummies and thought I would give it a try. This book had me up and running in 2 days and I actually understood "why" things were happening. This is a great book for beginners and has a hands on approach to the learning, which I find extremely helpful. This book is for anyone who wants to learn Crystal Xcelsius in a hurry.

Making Fancier Presentations from Excel

The 'For Dummies' books have done it again. This is a complete and thourough introduction to using Xcelsius to give you an entirely new set of sophisticated ways to show Excel data in graphical form. Xcelsius specializes in what they call dashboards. That is, the data is diaplayed in the form of gauges (speedometer, gas gauge, they even have what they call 'alerts' that are close to idiot lights). You can also design inputs in the form of sliders, buttons, again, not unlike an automobile dashboard. In addition to dashboards there are other features such a maps, enhanced charts, pictures -- all kinds of things to ehnance the visual experience of a presentation. Technically, Xcelsius compiles your visual model into a Flash (.swf) file and creates an HTML file that calls the .swf file. The HTML file is of course presented using a web browser, PowerPoint, Adobe PDF, Microsoft Outlook, or Plumtree. As in most 'For Dummies' books, this one starts slow, builds on the base, and by the end of the book you have a pretty good idea about the whole thing.

Crystal Xcelsius for Dummies

I used this book as a training manual to learn Xcelsius. The instructions were very clear and easy to follow. The chapters build on each other. It starts with the basics and you can build your simple dashboards immediately from this section. However you need to go through the whole book to really see the power and versatility of this application. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn Crystal Xcelsius.