Product How-To: Efficient Dashboard Charts

An efficient dashboard chart allows users to access the most amount of detail in a given chart while still keeping the chart easy to look at.

The Chart component’s ‘Properties’ dialog box provides the following tabs: General, Advanced, and Pre-Aggregate. The next sections discuss the chart-specific properties available under these tabs that permit making more data detail available without have to change chart settings.

The General tab in the ‘Chart Properties’ dialog box provides the following chart-specific properties.

Tooltip: Value is displayed as tooltip when mouse hovers over corresponding chart area.

Data Tip View: A Viewsheet component is displayed when mouse hovers over chart area. The component is filtered based on the hover region.

In this example, you will create a chart that displays quantity purchased by company. When the user hovers the mouse over a given company, the Chart will display a gauge as a Data Tip. This gauge will display the average quantity purchased by the individual company.

 
 

1. Create a new Viewsheet based on the sample ‘US Sales’ Worksheet.

2. Drag a gauge from the Component tree into the Viewsheet.

3. Configure the gauge to display the average quantity purchased:

• From the ‘Sales’ Data Block (top of the Component tree), drag the ‘Quantity Purchased’ field onto the gauge. This binds the gauge to the Data Block.
• Right-click the gauge, and select ‘Gauge Properties’ from the context menu. This opens the ‘Properties’ dialog box for the Gauge.
• Under the General tab, change the ‘Name’ property to “QuantityGauge”.
• Set the following limits: ‘Maximum’=200, ‘Minor Increment’=10, ‘Major Incremet’=25.
• Under the Data tab, select ‘Count’ form the ‘Aggregate’ menu. This will display the number of records (orders) for each company.
• Click ‘OK’ to close the ‘Gauge Properties’ dialog box.
• Resize the gauge to be about half the default size.

4. Drag a Chart element onto the Viewsheet grid.

5. Click the center of the Chart (or click the ‘Edit’ button at the topright). This opens the Chart Editor. Make the following selections:

• From the ‘Dimensions’ node in the ‘Data Source’ tree, drag the ‘Company’ dimension to the ‘X’ field in the ‘Data’ panel.
• From the ‘Measures’ node in the ‘Data Source’ tree, drag the ‘Quantity Purchased’ measure to the ‘Y’ field in the ‘Data’ panel. This creates a chart that displays quantity purchased for each company.
• Click the ‘Edit Dimension’ button, and select ‘Ranking’ to display only the top 10 companies. Click the ‘Apply’ button.
• Right-click on the one of the Chart’s X-axis labels, and select ‘Axis Properties’ from the context menu. Choose a slanted text rotation and a smaller font size to improve the axis appearance. Click ‘OK’.
  
• Resize the chart as desired.
• Right-click the Chart, and select ‘Properties’ from the context menu. This opens the ‘Chart Properties’ dialog box.
• Under the General tab, select ‘Data Tip View’. From the adjacent menu, select the ‘QuantityGauge’ component.
• Click ‘OK’ to close the ‘Chart Properties’ dialog box.

7. Preview the Viewsheet, and hover the mouse over different companies in the Chart to view the corresponding Data Tip (i.e., number of orders).

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