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Gestalt Laws, Charts and Tables: The way your brain wants them to be
I get asked by a lot of people how I seem to be able to format my charts and tables so that they look good and still convey the information in the most effective manner. I thought I would share my...
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Applied Gestalt Laws: Table Alignment
Most reports are based on combinations of tabular layouts, so to continue my series about visual design (see my previous post) I will focus on the most common and simple problem to fix: The...
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Hermann Grids, An optical Illusion Best Avoided
An interesting optical illusion is the so-called Hermann Grid illusion: the effect of seeing gray dots at the intersections of a black grid on a white background or a white grid on a black background....
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Parent-Child Dimensions in Analysis Services – Performance Walkthrough
Parent-child hierarchies are a good fit for many data structures such as accounts or employees, and while they can speed development in some cases, they can also cause performance problems in large...
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Formatting Tables in v7
We’ve had some great feedback from our Newsletter announcing the release of v7. A number of users have asked how we created the example in the Newsletter: So, today we’re going to show you how to...
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Creating rounded corners in Excel – revisited
Today we’re revisiting one of our more popular guides, Creating rounded corners in Excel Tables, and have updated it for v7.1. When Igor Asselbergs was contemplating the value of round corners in...
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Some Excel BI myths debunked – #6: Excel based BI can’t handle report sharing...
Here we continue our theme on the myths which get propagated about Excel based BI. The next argument is that Excel BI cannot handle widespread report sharing and distribution. Base case we actually...
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The Missing Link in Excel BI
When viewing a high level summary report or dashboard, users often want to delve into more detail on a specific area. In some cases that may be a drill down, in many others it may be to a different...
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Icon-based Navigation and Filtering in XLCubed
Version 9 introduced an embedded icon library and XL3PictureLink, which together make the creation of icon-led navigation and filtering simple. XL3PictureLink provides the same parameterised navigation...
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User control of dashboard layouts
Dashboard sheets were introduced with V9, primarily as a way to deliver mobile-friendly reporting with a responsive UI to auto-fit any screen size. Specific Targets which define the layout can be...
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