Hi everybody,
I am a corporate user of Crystal XCelsius 2008, and after 3 months using it, I just wanted to post here my opinions on the product and also some of the (big amount) of problems I've found with it in hope they are solved in future versions of XCelsius.
I find XCelsius a good product overall. It allows for fast deployment of interactive dashboards that are very appreciated by management, allowing for quick and informed decision taking. However, there are a number of issues and problems XCelsius needs to solve in order to become a trully powerfull dashboarding tool:
- I am running XCelsius 2008 in a brand new Windows XP SP3 laptop with 4GB of RAM, Microsoft Office 2007 and all the latest patches applied. However, XCelsius keeps crashing regularly for no reason whatsoever ("Could not load localized strings" error, "Error loading Excel" error and others). I am now manually saving my work every 3 minutes, but it's a big inconvenience that XCelsius isn't reliable enough.
- Every time I try to install a new XCelsius version/patch (XCelsius SP2 for instance), the setup stalls on registering modules and never finishes, having to manually kill the process. After much investigation (this forum helped a lot), I found out that this is due to incompatibility problems between XCelsius and McAfee Anti-virus which we use in our computers. This is the only software I've found problems with in this area, and anyway a corporation-oriented software should never ever have this kind of issues.
- Erratic behaviour. This might seem very strange, but I've found myself (more than once) having to re-enter a formula in the worksheet in XCelsius because the first time it simply didn't work. The second time it works without a problem.
- The Excel formula support is way too limited. Formulas like SEARCH or SUMIFS (new in Excel 2007) are critical in a data-driven enterprise environment, and not having them available is a big problem.
- While trying to overcome the above limitation I installed the XCelsius Component SDK to see if I could replicate the functionality of those formulas with custom components. Problem is, although I am fluent in ActionScript and MXML, the SDK documentation is so sparse I could not even figure out how to write my own function.
- Performance is another issue. When you use a reasonably-sized data set, XCelsius performance degrades exponentially, something not acceptable for corporate customers. I am not talking here about 10's of thousands of rows and columns, but simply 2,000 rows and 15 columns.
I am simply posting thsi here in the hope that I am not the only user experiencing those issues and that BO listens to its customers and imporves the overall XCelsius experience in the near future.
Thanks!