I was preparing some data for a client presentation yesterday using Roambi, and the presentation called for a number of different Roambi charts to be shown on a projector to a small group of executives. In addition to the projector display for this meeting, I needed to switch between six different Roambi charts. When these six charts are viewed in a specific order, it really exposed some clear and compelling business intelligence about this company’s social media performance and competitive threats.

The challenge is to present the data seamlessly and in a non-linear fashion without disjointing the presentation. Context shifting between charts wasn’t going to cut it – I needed a way to flip from chart to chart in a non-linear fashion and I also needed a few scripted pathways through this data.

My presentation requirements expose two shortcomings of Roambi and a most BI products on the iPad for that matter -

1. BI charts can’t be used in real-time to display results using the Apple (Nasdaq: APPL) VGA Display Adapter, Microstrategy’s iPad app is an exception;
2. Switching between charts takes precious time during the presentation and visually separates the key data points that when viewed fluidly, demonstrate a key intelligence finding. Roambi does provide a favorites option in the ES version that allows you to achieve some degree of context switching.

Roambi Blink (see The Big Mobile BI News is “Blink”) joins five existing Roambi Views – Cardex, CataList, PieView, SuperList and Trends – as well as an additional new View available today, Roambi Elements. Elements allows users to combine multiple charts and graphs easily into a single mobile dashboard, providing for convenient comparisons and analysis. However, this capability is available only in the enterprise version (Roambi ES) at a pricey $795/user and even if you have access to Roambi ES, you can’t display the results to a projector and the immediate accessibility in the dashboard is limited to four data views.

As is painfully noted in the Roambi Forum, users would love the ability to output charts directly to the VGA adapter – indeed, as one user suggests – “this would be an awesome feature”. I have to side with the users on this who are a bit stunned that iPad apps are so display challenged – it’s simply a very important feature that’s missing in Roambi. The ability to display BI is a key requirement for iPad-toting executives. But as I mentioned above, my specific requirements for BI presentations often include fluid chart switching and seamless connections of contextual data views.

The Solution

I’ve previously written about PictureLink (see Use Images to Make a Point); this very capable tool makes it possible to create non-linear presentations from screenshots. Furthermore, PicturLink’s clever hyper-linking feature lets you craft linked pathways between disparate images by embedding tap regions in the images.

PictureLink does one thing and it does it without fanfare or an over-the-top and complex user interface. It helps you organize collections of images in a way that make them logically interactive and fluid. By selecting regions (think image maps in HTML or HyperCard from the 80’s) you can create hot spot tap areas in the images that resolve to other images in the collection.

Here are five simple steps to create visually stunning and fluid presentations using Roambi and PictureLink.

1. Display each Roambi chart view needed for the presentation on iPad; snap a screenshot by selecting the home and power buttons simultaneously. (Tip – it’s a good idea to capture your screens in the approximate order you want to display them in the presentation)
2. Launch PictureLink and create a new presentation.
3. Select each image from your saved screenshot pictures. (Tip – you can rotate landscape images once you have them in a PictureLink collection.)
4. Create link zones on each chart that lead you to the next chart in the presentation.
5. Test the flow and presentation order and refine as needed. (tip – it’s possible to create numerous pathways through your images using multiple link zones and you can also create next and previous links on every image.)

Once you have the presentation of the images in the order you need, plug in your VGA adapter and PictureLink is ready to broadcast the presentation to a projector.

Here’s a quick video with a simple working example. Note how various locations in the chart images have been linked through invisible tap zones that I created. Bear in bind that it’s very difficult to video iPad let alone Roambi which uses a significant amount of black in its chart themes. To get a decent demo of a non-linear PictureLink presentation I gad to set the display to reverse black and white. Roambi, in case you weren’t aware, displays data with amazing clarity so I apologize for this less-than-amazing video.