Round corners in Xcelsius – Easily add images with transparent background to your dashboard

The Xcelsius image component is the key to creating a professional and good looking dashboard that will appeal to users and make them BI Happy.
Creating elaborate graphics with complex software such as adobe or gimp can be time consuming and complex (not to mention expensive in the case of adobe, gimp is free). One technique you can use to save time, effort and quickly and effectively create nice looking graphics is leveraging Power Point.
If you use MS Power Point 2007 (and let’s face it, who doesn’t have access to it?), you can create nice smooth image, with transparent background to incorporate into your Xcelsius dashboard in minutes.

First, pick your image from Power Point extensive image library. You can use the Insert menu to insert a SmartArt image, a Shape, or anything else such as a Clip Art image. After you insert the image into the slide, simply right click on it and select Save As Picture…

At this point you will be prompted to save the image. Notice the image will be saved into .png file format. This file format allows for transparent backgrounds, so you will be able to integrate the new image smoothly into your existing background, or components. Round corners and all.

Enjoy your professional looking dashboard..

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5 Responses to Round corners in Xcelsius – Easily add images with transparent background to your dashboard

  1. peter says:

    Hi Ron,

    I am using flash player 10.3 and xcelsius 5.3.0.0

    Thank you Ron, I really appreciate your support!

    • Ron Keler says:

      Peter, this is a problem that was introduced by Adobe in Flash 10.3 (if you downgrade to 10.2, your transparent images will work fine). There is no real solution at the moment, Adobe is supposed to fix this in their next major release. However, James Ambler published a very nice work around on the linkedin Xcelsius Gurus group. His solution was to convert the transparent .png files to .swf format and reimport them. That works fine in Flash 10.3 as well. He recommended using a tool called png2swf (http://www.develotec.com/png2swf/). This solution will work for now… Thanks – Ron

  2. peter says:

    This worked 2 months ago, and ever since I’ve upgraded my flash and ie explorer, it’s showing the grey background for my images.

    I was able to replicate this problem on all PCs, however Macs make the background of images transparent.

    Please advise as soon as you have a chance.

    • Ron Keler says:

      Peter, first of all, thank you for your comment. As for the issue you are describing, can you please tell which version of ppt, ie, xcelsius and flash you are using that is not allowing you use the transparent .png files generated from ppt? Thanks – Ron

    • Ron Keler says:

      Peter, Adobe introduced a bug in flash player 10.3 that prevents displaying transparent png images in swf files. I am looking to see if there’s a simple work around, will post as soon as i find something.. Thanks – Ron

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