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).