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Despite, or perhaps because of, the liberal use of applications such as Excel and Powerpoint, business presentations can be extremely dull affairs. Indeed, you often wonder if the slides are anything more than an aide memoire for the presenter.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Use Crystal Xcelsius and you can turn even the dullest of business presentations into snazzy interactive events.
You don’t need much in the way of skill or special equipment to use Xcelsius, just a Windows PC and a copy of Microsoft Office. T
hat’s because, as the name suggests, the program takes an Excel spreadsheet as its starting point, importing the model into a canvas of its own onto which you can drag a variety of visual modelling tools to manipulate and display the data.
For example, we loaded a sales forecast model and were quickly able to create a 3D graph of the data using a standard Xcelsius component.
Nothing special in that, you might think, but then we added slider controls to vary some of the projections and show in real time the effect of exceeding or failing to meet some of the targets.
Pushing the slider to the right increased sales and pushing it to the left would decrease the projected value, with the impact immediately reflected in linked graphs.
Naturally you can choose from a range of line, bar, pie and other chart components, along with dials, progress bars and speedometer-like gauges, not to mention maps, menus, item lists, radio buttons and so on.
These can all be dragged onto the canvas where they can be aligned, sized and made to look just how you want. Then, using Excel point-and-click range selection, each component can be linked to data in the spreadsheet.
Some components can also be used to insert data back into fields in the model. For example, we added a list showing the regions to be displayed in our graphs.
The value selected was then inserted back into a field in the model where it was used to recalculate the results, so only the sales from that region appeared on the associated graphs.
It’s possible to pick up labels, titles and headings directly from the underlying spreadsheet, drill down to linked tables and annotate the presentation directly.
Backgrounds can be added and there’s an instant preview facility to see what the end results will look like.
Once you’re happy with the presentation, it can be exported as a Flash animation (the necessary Macromedia software is installed automatically) either directly or ready embedded in a Powerpoint presentation, an HTML page or a pdf document.
The latest version (4.5) also adds one-click export to Microsoft Word.
There’s nothing particularly difficult about it, and anyone used to Excel will be able to master Xcelsius in just a few hours with some useful tutorials included in the package.
Plus, there’s a workgroup version (from £4,280 ex VAT) that can be linked to other data sources and adds facilities to export animations as Sharepoint Web Parts.
As well as business presentations, Xcelsius can be used to create Excel dashboards, visual calculators and a lot more besides.
The results really can be impressive, making it possible to turn dull spreadsheets into entertaining, informative, interactive displays. In the wrong hands, of course, the results could still be pretty boring, but then there’s not much anyone can do about that!
All Optimisers & Diagnostics
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