An Xcelsius Present related question:
I like to show two lines on the X-axis, one refering to the quarter (i.e. Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4) the second referring to a value per quarter (i.e. 10, 202, 50, 70).
In Excel I would use carriage return [char(10)] to break the line.
Xcelsius Present returns an error telling it is not compatible with the char function.

Does anyone know how to solve that problem?

Thanks.
Sandro

It’s possible to do effective things in Xcelsius, but they make it very hard. I did a number of Xcelsius models for a client a while back. I did some cool prototypes in Excel, but they wanted them in PowerPoint and PDF, so I did the Xcelsius near-equivalents.

I ran into issues with Xcelsius’ incomplete treatment of Excel formulas. More important, most of my chart effects rely on combination charts, and these are just undoable in Xcelsuis. Waterfall charts are not possible, because you can’t make a chart series completely invisible (or at least you couldn’t at the time, and I’ve heard that Crystal curtailed all Xcelsius development when they bought it).

@Jorge – I think the answer is in the middle. Clean charts that tell a story should always be preferred over charts with background images and excessive bling. The power is when you can take a mixture of Tufte, Few and Cleveland instead of taking Tufte to the extreme. One chart I recently presented that had the most impact was a scatter plot.

@Jacques – You can only do so much and recommend what is the right/optimal choice. In the end, if they want a circle cut into triangles, they get a pie chart. Just like if your boss wants the chart with excessive chartjunk, then you have two options. Do it or quit. It’s hard to coach and steer management (especially executives) to certain chart designs unless they are very data centric. Also, Xcelsius can be used to create effective charts, you just need to do a lot of fine-tuning- See Datapig Technologies. Mike has a lot of tutorials.