'Rev Counter' style reporting

[v41ley]

I'm creating a 'dashboard' report which will report a number of business measurements.
Is there any software available to represent the information in 'Rev Counter' style
once you enter the source data ? Be interested for any tips.

[mattley]

What sort of platform/environment?

I've done this type of thing in FileMaker. Little window in the corner of the screen, just storing an appropriate image for each set of values, and polling the data source every now and and again and displaying accordingly.

[zumbruk]

GNUPlot.

[v41ley]

mattley said:

What sort of platform/environment?

MS 2000. I was hoping to use Excel.

[boiler]

Apparently you can use a scatter diagram to emulate guage (I've never done it!). A guy called Andy Pope has a web page explaining it all...

See here


Of course, there is the question of are guages the most applicable sort of graph for this use. You will not be able to show any trend information, which can be important.

Andy.

[WannaNiceCar]

if you want to stick with Excel, then there is a product called 'Xcelcius' from Business Objects (Current owners of Crystal Reports etc) which can produce dashboards from Excel spreadsheets.

I havent actually used Xcelcius myself, but have played around with the dashboards within Crystal Reports and it seemed pretty good (Dashboards are not really relevant for my line of business, hence the reason for only playing around with them)

You can get a free trial, so it may be worth looking at?

Click Here

Edited to correct link!

>> Edited by WannaNiceCar on Tuesday 6th December 13:32

[mattley]

Try this approach.

Assuming a 0 to 100 scale and a 1 in 10 resolution....

Get/Make 10 graphics of rev counters showing the revs from 1K to 10K

Paste them into cells in an other worksheet ie paste 1Krev.jpg into cell A1, 2Krev.jpg into cell A2 ...etc

Where you want the display make a caclcutation cell along the lines of

IF <thenumberyouwantdisplayed> beteen 0 and 10, cell ( worksheet with images A1 )
ELSE <thenumberyouwantdisplayed> beteen 10 and 20, cell ( worksheet with images A2 )

...

dunno exactly what you need but the idea should work

[GreenV8S]

It would be possible to stitch a rev counter style display together using Excel graph, but it'd be quite fiddly. Far far easier to adopt one of the standard excel chart formats if you can.