Are you sitting comfortably? Then our story, "How to Ruin a Great Product," can begin. . . . 

Once upon a time (which is how all the best stories start) (well, except for those that start "It was a dark and stormy night . . . " but this isn't one of those) there was a really, really, really cool application called Xcelsius.

This software was from a company called Infommersion. This program allowed you to import an Excel spreadsheet and create a flash presentation with graphical controls and components to manipulate the underlying spreadsheet data. Using this software you could create the most amazing corporate information dashboards and analytical tools. It was pure magic.

So it was that I, your humble narrator, recognizing fabulosity, did discuss the product in my Gearhead column not once (my original review was in 2004!) but many times. It was that good a product.

But then the dark clouds of acquisition did swirl across the commercial landscape and in late 2005 Business Objects purchased Infommersion and Business Objects was, in turn, acquired by SAP AG in January this year. And in all of this swirl and flurry of filthy lucre the Xcelsius product apparently got rather sidelined.

The previous release of Xcelsius, Version 4.5, was turned loose in June 2006, and the latest, Xcelsius 2008, in mid March this year. The latest release is, so I am told, a complete rewrite and went from being a mere glimmer in the corporate eye to a full release in just 18 months. Way too fast for such a complex product. And it shows.

I hadn't had a chance to look at Xcelsius 2008 until a week or so ago, and within minutes of installing and firing it up I found problems. An obvious problem was Xcelsius' habit of randomly changing which spreadsheet cells a control was linked to.

But that was as nothing compared to the dumbest bug of all – and I am apparently the first person to find this gotcha: flash presentations created with this version of Xcelsius that have text entry fields and labels (such as "Enter the amount") have a problem. When you run the presentation and you use the tab key to jump from one text field to the next you can wind up in a label. Even though the label should be static text, when you type the label will be changed.