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Back to school

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:11

Simon Jones gets some help with his school work from PC Pro readers, and reveals the changes that have happened in the Digital Dashboard technology

Stephen Cox's solution has far fewer steps, but takes the biscuit for obscure use of Excel functionality, as he uses a PivotTable to present the data exactly as we wan it. Gather the Year Seven and Year Nine data in one workbook and then choose Data | Pivot

Table and PivotChart Report from the menu. The PivotTable and PivotChart Wizard will start up. In the top half of the Wizard window, it asks 'Where is the data you want to

analyse?' and the third option it offers you is 'Multiple consolidation ranges'.

How you're meant to know you want this option is beyond me, but here's how this trick works: choose this option and press the Next button. The next question is 'How many page fields do you want?' The answer is actually 'None' but you can't say that here, so select 'I will create the page fields' and press the Next button.

At step 2b you get to point to the ranges of the data you wish to consolidate, so point to the Year 7 data and then press the Add button, then point to the Year 9 data and press the Add button again (remembering to include the column headers in both ranges). Press the Next button and choose where to put the PivotTable, then press the Finish button.

The PivotTable shows all the data in the right order with the test results in the two columns, and the only extra thing you need to do is use the Table Options dialog to turn off the Grand Totals on rows and columns - they won't make any sense in this case.

This solution is elegant and really easy to implement, involving no complicated functions or impenetrable SQL syntax. In short, I wish I'd thought of it!

New Digital Dashboards

Earlier still, back in issue 67, I wrote about Microsoft's Digital Dashboard technology. Nearly a year on from the release of the original Digital Dashboard Starter Kit, Microsoft has just released the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit 2.01. Some huge changes have been made to the technology, both behind the scenes and up front in the user and developer interfaces.

The original Digital Dashboards were HTML documents containing layout information and some simple JavaScript or VBScript functions: they only ran within Outlook, and you needed to be a first-rate HTML/scripting guru to be able to design a new Dashboard of any complexity. Designing new 'nuggets' to place on these Dashboards was another job that was strictly for the serious propeller heads. However, most of these difficulties have now been swept away by XML. The new-look Digital Dashboards work in virtually any browser, as well as inside Outlook; and the better the browser, the better the user experience.

There are new Web-based tools for designing Dashboards and Web Parts - which is what nuggets are now called. Development of 'serious' Web Parts can be done in Visual InterDev via a tool that adds some extra menus and options to the InterDev environment. The end user can minimise or display each Web Part, use the Layout option to drag and drop the Web Parts into five different zones on the page, or add new Web Parts to the display by choosing from a local catalogue of available parts. Dashboards can be nested one inside another and navigated just by clicking on the name of the sub-Dashboard in the navigation bar.

Previously, Dashboards were just HTML pages and the nuggets were parts of the HTML page, but these new Dashboards and Web Parts are XML documents that must conform to the Dashboards and Web Parts schemas. Dashboards and Web Parts can be stored in three places: the Windows 2000 File System, a SQL Server 7 (or 2000) database or, once it's released, an Exchange Server 2000 Web Store. The Dashboard Factory is an Active Server Page (ASP) application running on Internet Information Server (IIS), Windows 2000 Server or Windows 2000 Advanced Server, and is the application that takes all the Web Parts contained in your Dashboard and processes them to convert these many XML documents into one, combined HTML document that can be rendered by any browser.