Xcelsius can't handle an unlimited amount of data. So if you are working with large datasets and your Dashboards are more considered as a visual reporting tool instead of a Dashboard, you have to be inventive with your data connections and data architecture.

Let's take a look, what kind of trigger options for data refresh the Xcelsius 2008 data manager provide (we will focus now on the refresh trigger options in the red frame):

Xcelsius data manager gives you the ability to trigger on a specific cell.

1.) Refresh when the value of the cell changes
2.) Refresh when the value of the cell becomes (is equal to)

That are not so much options, but in combination with excel logic you can handle much more triggering scenarios.

Imaging the following case:

You have a Dashboard, which provides some management information about a multinational enterprise.
Via a country selector the user may select a specific country to view the corresponded information.

Due to the datasets for each company are very large you are enforced to load the data for each country on the fly.
Another requirement is to provide an overall-view of all countries of the enterprise. The cube does not provide an overall view and so you have to aggregate the data for the overall-view on you own (e.g. via a WebI Layer).

As there a several differences between overall-view and country-specific view (e.g. currency), you double all visualisation components and control them via dynamic visibility.

When the dashboard starts the overall-view is loaded by default. When the user selects a country from the country selector a parameter is send to the WebI-aggregation-Layer to refresh the underlaying report depending on the selected country.

So you have to trigger the refresh of the single country report-connection with the option: "When value changes".

Now you are concerned with the following dilemma: The overall-view is loading by default and therefore in the "stomach of the Dashboard". If the user selects a specific country and switches back to the overall-view, the data for a specific country is loaded again (because the trigger value changed), although it is not necessary because the user switched to overall-view.

The solution to this dilemma is to trigger the data refresh of the the overall-view on load an to trigger the specific country connection to refresh "when value changes and is not equal to".
Sounds simple, but how do i achieve this? I can's see any option in data manager for this requirement.
The solution is to use the reference option of "when the value of the cell becomes".

Let's take a look at an example.
I have a trigger cell, which contains a country-id that is the parameter for the underlaying WebI report. When the value changes the connection shall be refreshed. But it should not be refreshed if the overall-view is selected (e.g. country-id = 0).

Now we add a second trigger cell, which checks if the country-id is equal to "0" (overall-view). If the country-id is equal to "0" the trigger cell is set to "2". (you may also take another value, except of "0"). If the country-id is not "0" the trigger cell gets the same value than the country-id cell.

Now we set the trigger options to refresh when value "country-id" becomes value "trigger-cell" (see below).

The refresh behaviour for this connections if now the following:

a.) If a user selects a specific country, the country-id (not equal to "0") is set to the "country-id-cell". The "trigger-cell" realizes that the value is not equal "0" and gets the same value as the "country-id-cell".
-> Xcelsius realizes that the "country-id" is equal to the "trigger-cell" and refreshed data for the specific country.

b.) If a user is in the specific country view and selects the overall-view, the value of the "country-id-cell" is set to "0". The trigger cell realizes that the "country-id" is "0" and changes to the value "2".
-> Xcelsius realizes that the "country-id" is not equal to the "trigger-cell" and therefore won't refresh the data. The overall-view is provided via dynamic visibility and the doubled compontents in Real-Time.

And now i wish you all "happy triggering"...