Dynamic Xcelsius Chart Color

Dynamic Xcelsius Chart Color

Written by: Ryan Goodman
Published: November 19th, 2008
4911 views
Posted in Xcelsius, Creative Workarounds

During my webinar last week Xtreme Makeover, I showed a demo dashboard where a user could drill

down from a pie chart down to a bar graph and pass the color from the selected slice to the chart below.

This is a simple technique for creating consistency with color, which facilitates intuitive analysis; if it

were only as simple to setup in Xcelsius… In essence, I am using chart alerts to dynamically change the

color for a single series chart. This method will only work with bar and column charts.

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Inside of my spreadsheet I associate a multiplier for each product line (1,2,3…). When I enable the pie

chart drill down feature, I include this multiplier in my source data and data insertion range.

Directly under the insertion range where we link the bar chart’s data, I perform a simple calculation

using the multiplier (=[value]/[target multiplier]). These rows highlighted in green within the

spreadsheet are the bar chart alert targets.

Inside of the bar chart’s alerts tab, I color coded alert levels for each value in my pie chart.

With everything hooked up, you get a nice effect as someone clicks on the pie chart. What would be a

better solution?...Having an ability to bind colors to the spreadsheet… As a user community you should

definitely request this functionality on the BOBJ support and forum sites. With an ability to bind colors in

the spreadsheet, you could enable this functionality for all components within Xcelsius, and in turn

facilitate better analysis for end users.