Looking forward to add a little more to your visualizations? Spice them up with a clickable moving ticker! For those who are not familiar with Dashboard Design (formerly known as Xcelsius), a moving ticker is a banner which has a similar look to a stock market ticker displaying customized moving labels from right to left. The one described here is also clickable, which means that when you click on any label it can execute many actions such as opening URL’s.
We always try to build dashboards that people really use, and for that we need to find a balance between functionality and design. The design might not seem as important as the functionality, but trust me, in order to get the attention of users you need to build something that really catches their eyes, such as this ticker feature which is easily noticeable to do it´s constant movement.
Step by step process
In order to help you make your Dashboards eye-catching, I am going to show you how to build a clickable ticker to open URL’s with the following steps.
Let’s start by organizing our spreadsheet (find example below – Fig.1) with the following information:
- Labels: Information that will be displayed on the ticker
- URLs: Links that will be opened when clicking on the labels
- Auxiliary info: cells containing Index, destination, status, key, URL to open, which will be explained later on
When your spreadsheet is ready follow these steps:
1) Drag and Drop the ticker object to your canvas.
The ticker object can be found under the category “Selector”.
2) Configure the Ticker object’s properties.
In the General tab, assign the labels you would like to show on the dashboard.
Insertion type: Position
Destination: This cell is key as it will give the position number of the clicked label on the ticker.
e.g: If you click the third label of the ticker this cell will be a “3”, it it will change when you click another label.
3) Drag and Drop a URL object to your Canvas.
The URL object can be found under the category “Web Conectivity”
4) Configure the URL object’s properties and behavior.
URL: In this cell you need to build a “vlookup” formula as it is shown in fig.1.
In the behavior tab under the Trigger Behavior properties you find:
Trigger cell: This is going to be the same as the destination cell of the Ticker (Sheet1!D$4 in this case – Fig 2.).
Check the “When Value Changes” option.
Hide this button by selecting different values for the status and key cells as below:
The outcome and conclusions
After completing these steps you should have built a clickable moving ticker which will spice up your visualization.
This solution will allow you to:
- Open Intranet/Internet URL’s from moving labels.
- Change visibility dynamically for graphs and images from you Dashboard Design visualization.
- Enhance the design and gain visibility of your visualizations
I hope this feature is useful to you and it brings positive feedback from your end users. Please feel free to leave a comment or question below.