One thing was abundantly clear at the 2004 MAX conference in New Orleans: the third-party Flash market is growing rapidly. This is due to Macromedia's decision to provide APIs and open standards. The result of this decision is that the Flash developer will now have a virtual cornucopia of exciting new tools that will increase productivity and flexibility.

One of the most interesting of these new tools is put out by a California company called Infommersion and is called Xcelsius. This tool will allow you to connect a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet into a self-contained Flash file that can be displayed on the web or even exported into a PowerPoint presentation. Once inside the Flash file, you can use powerful Flash components to create "what-if" scenarios. If all that isn't enough, you can then save the "what-if" results back to the original spreadsheet.

Let's look at an example.

When we first open Xcelsius you see a screen similar to Figure 1.

Xcelsius has 42 built-in components and 9 chart formats to assist you in putting together a dynamic presentation. One could easily assume that as this product grows, even more components will be available. However, even if that does not happen, what is available now will more than handle most needs.

We begin by selecting the type of component or chart you want to use. In this example, I will use the Bar Chart and then place that chart where I want it.

Figure 2 shows some unique additional components that are available. While we don't have space to show all of them, there are components featuring U.S. and European maps, backgrounds, prebuilt buttons, tables, and grids.

For this example, I select the Horizontal Slider and place it right below the Bar Chart. The components can be moved and resized easily. Our screen now looks something like Figure 3.

One tool I found handy is an Object Browser. While our example has only two objects in it, you could easily build more complex graphics. The browser is shown in Figure 4. Here we can select, hide, and rename components.

The next step is to link our components to a Microsoft Excel worksheet. This is just a simple matter of clicking on an icon and browsing to the file you want. However, this also brings me to my one real quibble with this program.

Xcelsius is not just linked to the Excel worksheet, but to Microsoft Excel version 2003. This is because it uses XML as the connecting technology. For most users, this might not cause a problem. However, if you are an OpenOffice user, as I am, Xcelsius appears to be unusable. To do this review, I had to install Excel on my computer. With more and more users switching technology, I hope Infommersion addresses this issue with future updates.

After the linkage is created, the rest is simple. If you know how to create a chart in Excel you can easily use Xcelsius. You simply go to the chart, right-click, and select Properties. From here on, the style of the menus and dialogue boxes is very much like you would find in Excel. You can assign cell ranges for the X and Y axes, define chart properties, and even enter chart titles.

You have to repeat the same process for the slider (or whatever variable component you may be using). In my test, I bound the slider to a cell in the worksheet, which will vary for "what-if" scenarios. If there were to be more than one variable, I could easily handle that by placing multiple control components and binding them to the appropriate cells. Once again, all of it was extraordinarily easy to do.

The last step is to export the finished file to the format you would like. In most instances you will want to do this as a Flash .swf file. To do this, I simply selected the File > Export option. As a handy feature, I could have previewed the export first.

When I ran the Flash movie, I was able to move the slider and see the chart respond to the variable the slider was changing. Of course, in the background XML had the .swf file bound to the worksheet, and the slider was also varying the cell it was bound to. The results were truly impressive.

Among the export options were the aforementioned .swf file, a Powerpoint slide, HTML, and a Flash file attached to an Outlook e-mail. What more could you want?

Some of the other components can quickly and easily give you spectacular results. For example, you can use the Map component (U.S. or Europe) and tie each state into cells of the worksheet (see Figure 5).

Unfortunately, using static print (as you see here) does not do this product justice. To truly experience it, you should go to their Web site at www.infommersion.com. There you can test drive some of the features and really see them in action. You can also downoad an evaluation copy of the program.

As of this printing, Xcelsius is available in three versions. The Standard edition has all 42 components as well as most of the functionality I showed in this review. This sells for $195.

The Professional edition gives you the ability to save the results back to Excel as well as some additional connectivity options. Also, you can trigger the XML for updates using JavaScript as the event trigger. This edition goes for $495.

The Enterprise edition is for network licensing situations and you would need to contact Infommersion for pricing.

Summary
Once you try it, I'm sure you will agree that it is rare to see such incredible power in such a simple to use package. If you want to make your presentations exciting and interactive, Xcelsius is a must.